endlessly falling from world to world, the golden prince
revolves among the stars, causing the ether to hum
moving slightly in the still pool, the black carp
breathes shadow and light, holding the world in place
sliding from fret to fret, the child's lucent fingers
coax melodic flow from long veins of fear
turning and turning in the six foot field, unseen blood
moves everywhere, laden with time's harmonic debris
don't mistake these words for your ticket to meaning,
Gino—they are only shadows on binary pivots
When God retired to his private chambers, he carried
with him no book, having no further need of words.
Where T. E. Hulme called the night sky a star-eaten blanket,
I prefer to see it as a colander perforated by children.
Before the ikon, incense burns steadily, its fragrance
a parody of the devout heart burning to ash.
In the yard, a sparrow's carcase; its slender ribs
define a winged and feathered cathedral for maggots.
Lady Wisdom danced at the very Beginning of beginnings,
her only raiment a belt of unopened eyes.
Job, Solomon, and the dour Preacher all knew
the sweetness of Wisdom's kiss and its bitter aftertaste.
Jupiter hangs in the southeast night after night,
hoping, perhaps, that some mortal will remember his majesty.
Gino, you chose, not just prison, but this very cell,
locked yourself in, and swallowed the key. Pray for emesis.
Geometric mud rising from its primeval bed
assumes a vector of flight slanting into clouds
Stacked cubes spheres cones tetrahedrons—
art strips the mountain to its idea
Binary holes etched on a compact disk
spell the numbers of any song you care to hear
Wind-scoured dust drifts across the flatlands
to form a bank across the dry stream
Adam/Eve—another binary pair—1 and 0
the lodgepole pine next to the rising moon
Out of these two, endlessly chained,
anything you can name can be named
Thirteen reclining at table for supper
another pattern to etch into song
Christ's clay cup, shattered in the dance of opposites—
out of its shards, a new music breaks
"Newton, to the muses dear," chops
the fallen apple into universal principles.
"The stars in their courses fight against" the brittle calculus,
neurons in the grey factories weave the Emperor's new suit.
The strawdogs, unbound by flame, recoil in crackling howls;
the bonfire formed of dark and light burns into the heart.
"A sign: what you can lie with," as David lies with Bathsheba
on the drowsy palace roof, a sign of royal apathy.
"Proprieter of 'dark satanic mills' seeks bovine dancer
to illuminate the subdivided pastures of his accounts."
Gracefully turns the Shulamite in her ivory bed,
the king's brass mask glowing in the brazier's dusk.
"Who loves me comes to me," the cosmic monster roars;
Teratological Deity, guide again my hesitant chariot.
"Swiftly I fell in love with her glancing eyes,
even as her father and I fought to the death."
Exchanging sarcasms, the retired professors do not hear
the moan of Thor's hammer as it flies.
Next poem in the Contraries loop
Undoing the balance of Self and other, music returns
the dial to zero, the extreme point where Neither hides.
Untuned flutes make cross-harmonies of dawn-fraught nebulae
while drums advise the stars to abandon all closer hope.
Dissonant tones of grey suffuse the shadow-patterned snow:
tumbling flakes encourage the wind to grow spikes and curving fangs.
Oh, the lies the Masters tell, the Teachers who hold
in waxen fingers the small, cold voices coaxed from brittle hearts.
Notes blurt as the horn-man tunes his many-tubed instrument:
the brass loops map a geometry of bartered sound.
List on the back of a postcard all the words you know for "hope":
write small enough to leave room to sign your name in vanishing ink.
Before the artist unburdened his Self of all that rots,
he drew the only lovéd face on water with a dry stick.
In the hollow moments between one day and the next, the Other
presses its thumbs in your eyes until they explode in secret colors.
Next poem in the Otherness loop
Air stirred by the window fan causes
the long tubular windchimes to sound softly.
Nietzsche's hypothetical dancing god
shivers in summer rain dropping through locust leaves.
Stripping away all parts of speech from the ego,
we burn their referents in a crystal censer.
The rain increases, its wet syllables running
together in a single, agglutinated refrain.
"En arche ho logos," John gospelled, placing
the Word in the gulf before light began.
"Only one Christian so far, and he got nailed."
Thus, Gino, your pretensions shatter as they dance.
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