The Rectifications & Ad Fontes
The Rectifications
I.
Watch, if you have eyes
and your eyes are turned off,
my heart, she said.
Look. The first tremor
will foresee it all.
By all I mean all.
The opening of the eyes,
the entire history of desire
The lion and the bumblebees,
and the rainfall in the house
that at last reads and reveals
what has been written.
The cup, an omen,
the chair, the empty chair,
famous ruined cities
upstairs.
And tongues begging
where they wake up in the rich air,
for the mercy of an empty cup.
And for what has been written
at last to be locked
in the simple heart
of anyone secret to the world,
safe from the Lord of Death
for a thousand years.
By all, I mean all, tenderly,
on a friable shore.
The precessions of what we are
in the restive words
at the margin of the sayable
for a thousand years.
II.
For a thousand years a book has slept
and lost no power for I saw it in a dream,
deeply reposed, cast in a stone divine,
emerald. For emerald in Israel
was the light left on in Dagon’s brain.
And when I woke I began to talk
of things and deeds that only fish remember.
That the angel of snow governs the angel of prayer,
and the Thelemites eat snow from limestone troughs.
We are the giants in the land, fat on pure motion.
It is a time of pure mission,
receiving the Word when my word is not in me.
III.
Lift your right hand and touch my breath.
Look, she said, the heart will show its word
in the ruins of my breath.
What is left? What is left of the mighty hand?
What is the right hand?
She would not teach me,
but she raised a glass of milk
that turned to blood,
from blood to belief,
from belief to an image,
from an image to cold milk
spilled in a Russian stream.
The horse fell down the stairs.
And there were men bleeding,
ambushed by what they really are.
Then her heart entwined its fingers
in a figure I couldn’t divine,
but one hand was fire
and the other was form,
or forming and destroying
went the right and the left,
the hands of breath, a lambent releasing
with something enclosed
that ambushed me beyond any answer.
IV.
Thistledown seeds of a rumor. Castle destroyed.
Tear, she says, apart your mind.
For a child is hidden there in the egg
whose mother is an ancient rumor,
whose father is unknown.
Will you listen to the child’s footfall
in the filthy stables, enchanted
by someone you cannot be?
His tears are your words,
unsure of which gate opens.
His tears are not yours, but your words.
He cries out for matter, for more light,
for horses.
V.
Lights, she told me, are eyes.
Was this Trimalchio’s banquet in the cave,
with invisible flashes
of rushing wings in the dark,
such androgynous beauty?
Was Jacob flapping his wings,
hovering over the angel?
Eyes were certainly twinkling in the knife.
O when will the Jews wake up,
wake up and watch their genitals’ petals
open at last with no fear!
The lights assemble.
Let there be many lights
the many gods
in the temple sang,
and it was good, commingling rays
that are the first blood in the garden.
The light bleeds. By the light, I read,
by the way our mothers
winged toward our fathers,
feathered in the day’s heat.
By the reading’s own light,
I lift the sky enough to comfort you.
There is a road in the garden
and children are walking,
and these children without fathers
bring us the coolness of origins.
Milk of their shadows
we drink and understand.
So later that night
I read in an Egyptian scroll,
which, by that river,
some farmer had found
in the green grass of his sleep,
I read of the child of the fish,
passing all measure,
who climbs the spine down
into the wilderness of lights.
VI.
Beraishit is the last word, the last fruit,
she said, in the relative darkness of my mind.
And it was my perfect shame
to be not contemporaneous with all true writing.
This word was carved in the tree
through which no Elohim pass,
she said, unless with a late poem,
the last of all, the key
that words may beat into a door.
There’s building a door, and there’s wintering
among the daughters of men and entering.
A bitter blessing has its sight trained on you
as you walk toward that tree.
So enter in your brother’s skin, the bear’s skin,
ursine, uterine, or do not enter at all.
Do the Judas kiss, the salmon-leap
that betrays us all.
Ad Fontes
for AC, for the first occasion
I.
Quemadmodum, in what manner,
in the manner of the waters,
all of its five fingers
moving toward a beginning,
bewildered, panteth
for the springs of waters.
Mastery in service. Service in mastery.
The music, which sounds like stars,
seeks the headwaters of what I really am.
II.
Cervus desiderat, the hart seeks, goes after.
As the poem yearns for me without mercy,
I see a personage or figure of longing.
The woman (is she a woman?)
whose name is Dwelling (this is her evening)
conceals in her robes the hand of mercy,
and the other seems to go at twilight into our houses
in Palestrina’s motet that makes my heart pure,
prepared, a bird bound to be beautiful,
but bound. That conspicuous hand masters me.
It is an imposed image that I am not free to refuse,
a thief who knocks and, in an instant, enters.
It is the messenger, the thief, in whose errors,
traces, fingerprints, footprints, I’m enthralled,
possessed, called into the play of sexual form on a Friday,
ad fontes, aquarum,
of the waters, the sources,
daughters or the rays of light in many directions,
bidding and forbidding all that I might say.
III.
That is the freedom that is mine, and ours,
as we stumble through dream toward the imperial light:
every thing speaks and every voice I hear
is a claustral creator and every thing that speaks
is my master, she who bore Lilith’s anger,
and Lilith’s lust, the marks of Adam’s teeth,
the wounds of daybreak and the sound of stillness,
the hole in her breast where the castaway candle
will not go out,
where an icon in the light of her grief
hardly shows the face of her first love
I am only a shadow of.
I am daughter, only. Bat Kol.
IV.
I am the instrument, the one that tells lies.
O make my limbs strong
so that the voice in me may understand
or transmute all that the Accuser says,
so the bitter, estranged star, the knave
is Love or Love’s consort, an animal in my thigh,
the hart that runs toward alkaline springs
and leaps backwards for it sees there
the Lady of the Lake unlocking her body.
Hart or heart, it is not clear.
Hide your God, Paul in one of his letters writes,
hide your devil. Paul Valéry. It is not clear.
Hide or heed, I do not know who goes there,
an animal, or a stranger in fur.
There are letters in the fur, which look like stars.
The stranger,
walking up the stairs to my room,
has one hand concealed in the voice that had been mine.
Is it the right hand or the left?
Is that a horn shining between her eyes?
Up the stairs she does not answer,
such sweetness of denial…
she leads the snakes that do not turn their heads.
V.
There the poem could end,
does end,
but there are ridges beyond which the first light
still hunts the lost child, whose antlers are burning,
incessant urges, commissions
that loosen this and every occasion,
or loosen the grip of my left hand
that held faces.
Voices, faces of mastery engraved in the ear
that already structure the heart beyond occasion,
for the morning when the child hunts the doe
and finds nothing but trees, the forest,
the infrastructure of answer that seems to be love.
Daedalus’s beehive, a dark and shining thing.
When I see the hart running through the trees
toward the source of the water
the water and the ancient elms are phantasmic
and real, and the play of the heart is real,
and its leap is the actual thirst I know this night
for the springs of despair.
A thirst for despair?
For despair. For Paradise where a child cries
turning a page and the page is blank.
For the rage that cleans the mirror
wherein the sky folds backwards,
and the birds are never beautiful, but twist in fear,
so that the Shekhinah (is she a woman?)
lifting her window in November
impersonates the man
whose fear illuminates his shadow.
She resembles his fear.
He resembles…a man…
Meeting her at the well
he says, Signora,
andiamo,
I tire not as before.
10 & 11 November 2021
