EXPEDITION
Stars wept and oceans held their breath
and every stone along the road held back its tears
moths flew straight instead of in fluttery loops
and flame laughed then wheezed then was silent as a blank sky
until one by one a black cloud-tuft enter it or a
feeble ray of light cross its path
Adam raised his head but no creature
dared return his gaze these very ones he had once
named so carefully each serpent’s coil of them
having lovingly caressed their furry necks or
learned the alphabet from watching them take wing
lopsidedly soaring then righting themselves then
swooping like a written letter’s final happy stroke
Eve walked with her head down
saying goodbye to every beloved blade of grass
it would take millenniums for Whitman to reclaim in
original pure light and she also wept as she felt the
fine webs of sweet connection with all sentient matter lightly
unstick themselves from her body as she
walked forward over the moaning turf
And as they passed pools and forests they once
knew by secret name so sweet to their
tongues each nook and quick vista to their
senses known once the way blind fingers
recognize Braille
As they walked now to their darker and denser music they also
felt themselves somehow sinking through a
strangely different kind of matter one less
translucent one far more enigmatic
With each footfall the landscape became
unfamiliar the bird cries abstract the sound of
rushing water a loud wordless whoosh
The earth under their feet more solid
the world around them alien
every crack of twig or flick of leaf a possible
deadly serpent in hiding withholding its knowledge until it
strike
Their eyes also filled with tears through which they saw
a hard universe to fathom
distant stars overhead also weeping but now
unseen and silent to their senses
Adam turned to her who was fleeing
backward out of sight but facing forward like
Eurydice streaming away from Orpheus back into the
underworld
Eve’s tearful eyes shining like planets
her arms at her sides her wide mouth silent
5/27
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ADAM’S PEAK
I’m too alone in the world, yet not alone enough
to make each hour holy.
--
Rilke / Book of Hours
Lead me down the sacred avenue
I can’t go it alone
Even inside the womb I was
not alone
In the ante-world when I was not even I
I was not alone
Multiplicity rings a single bell
it stands out from the crowd
I took the divine guide’s hand long ago
to reach the stone implacable wall
suddenly alone I stood
alone with the Alone
Adam was all alone in the Garden
until names rolled off his tongue
Hippogriff caryatid Cassiopeia cassowary
everything sings out its name
The Garden we’ve come from is the Garden we
go to with translucence the aim
Holy Guide O Holy Gardener
Your eyes speak volumes the heart decodes
I sink into forwardness
opposite Adam’s Peak
White guide of my black heart
Black guide of my white
You reach into my dark
like a deer bounding away
as lightly as air
Guide me everywhere
5/29
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THE SINGING CENTERS OF THEIR BEING
The delicate tendrilly tips of all things as they
slide in graceful arcs across each other’s elegant
surfaces
Each things “thingness” with concentric circular
halos of light around it radiating out in glittery
circular motions past each other’s
scintillating radii
Intimate close-detailed fuzziness then
uttermost clarity of closeness of each thing’s most
almost micrcoscopic mostness of thingness almost
seeming to look back at you on the same eyebeam you
look at it with and with the same overwhelming
love of looking
Then the vast view taking in even planets and their
visible characteristics of gas-swirl and crater-crag
above us in a blue-purple sky also overly
crowded with angelic presences as if echoes of
light stuttering back and back into infinite space
above everything visible into the apprehensible
Invisible starlight blackness and more starlight
The unveiling of all things openly and
secretly from elephants bigger than houses
to something more furtive and flittery than fireflies
more mysterious and also in mightier motion
The total lack in everything of sexual ambition yet an
urge and pulse of everything together in almost
erotically charged harmony but in the
matrix of all innocence unleashing its lusciousness
in something like the greenness of clover beds and the
neon brightness of tiny flowerettes there
And then everywhere creatures of sentient nature nuzzling each
other
in languorous elegance with sweet eyes
eyelashed and heavy-lidded or quick-blinking and
vivid in this plush abundance with soft
breathing sounds accompanying and overlapping
All the sights and sounds of Eden intertwined everywhere you
are in motion or stillness near water with delicious
water sound everywhere splashing and gurgling forward or
gushing fountainward and geyser-like upward around you in
a fine aerated spray so fine it silvers the air
Uttermost transparency of everything fresh each moment revealing
an
epic testament to the grandeur of simple things
held together on buoyancies of nothing but God’s Light in
endless web-thread ligaments between things and within things
No motion anything but gracefully made throughout static forwardness
in concert with everything
all ringing together like intricate bells
And Father and Mother Adam and Eve stand here and sing
each thing’s individual presence
and understand here each thing’s individual
interdependence in perpetual motion in
each tick of timelessness
And with each other they are never alone
and a great Face of sweetness bends low above them
Whose divine eyes they watch themselves through
afraid of nothing in each rainbow spotlight of intensest
all-seeingness in the pure-lit and
singing centers of their being
6/4
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