Thyrsus
My brother is a god. Not Silenus but a new
Satyr, ascendant. I do not need to paint him with
a faun’s legs; he already has them, double-jointed, thin,
woolly. They support his sagittarian torso,
giant. He struts, but out of an argument, a compulsion, & not
pride. A difficulty
of speech is a divine problem, a slurred
murmuration whispered in an amplified, archaic
grove. He speaks perfect English to his dog. By my brother
I now know the mode of gods is not mischief or cunning or
imitating human failings.
Far from it. Knowledge is an autism.
Hail, meaning;
converse with thyself. A god’s privacy is massive.
Vajra
There may be no stable ground state
at the cosmological level…
— Ilya Pregogine
Time precedes existence. A little devil loads his pockets with
quanta, a craftsman. Evil precedes time, making a hinge
it pivots on, multidimensionally, an origami
of variant radiations. Devils manipulate time with hands
the size of squirrels. Too few of us recognize these devils & the evil
they render as scale & pattern. Let alone cherish them. Even
the so-called faithful. Our largest larus — the black-backed gull
— opens its wings like an umbrella designed by a bookbinder —: joints
of feathers on ribs of bone which feel the air as
curvature. Do you believe your cat is actually an angel? And birds?
How does a tunafish experience thunder? A vivisection of gas, a turbulence of
stars? Hardly. At each instant the deep sea communicates
lingering flashes of lightning; they push
like impulses through nerves, sprayed along chains of
sodium chloride. Barely revelatory. These
are deep sea fish. A dreaming tuna delves the divine
gullet, its alimentation. Gulls,
ashore, sup from tubs of oil, harvest
of an evisceration. The message of the subcontinental masters
was this simple: compassion
is the form awakening takes. Animals, atmosphere, supernatural toilers, threading
atemporal warps of darkness: each requires
the miniature equilibrium our empathy
slides on, emptily.
The Staff of Life
is an axle. Moses wanting bread summoned water. Who
can blame him? Nowadays a deliverer
would never wield a serpent but rather a metal rod, supporting
a driveshaft. The desert’s been paved; nomads
traverse it in a mere forty minutes. The waterwheel
yielded a turbine. Potential energy is a farce of gravity. Kinesis
speeds an aging Gremlin across the country. A Bug too. The spindles
burn with luminescent grease; the unfettered
quaff tankards of fossil
& jubilate. Have you ever been driven from coast to coast? The seas
really are shining. In Elysium, the man
who envisioned the whaler feels a rich familial emotion
toward Henry Ford as he reaches to shake his hand. It is
always worth remembering that Moby Dick is, at last, mystical.
So is On the Road. America
requires literature of combustion as
barbaric as it is scientific. Gnosis is a moving
fluid converted into power.