On Circumcision's evening
The night's orbs bleed
On the compass line
With violence against
Their impetus to fall into one,
The dread inevitable recall
Written before all time.
The air suffused with a force
Gnawing at my bowels
- At our cycle's close -
With my eyes upturned to see
The foreshadow of the final meridian.
There I saw the foreskin of Christ
Burning a hole in the sky,
Around which thousands of angel hosts
Hymn and circumambulate.
O holy languid Dawn,
What ancient rest have
you discovered?
What great sleep
have you disturbed?
Hidden away in the
bowels of the earth?
What light withers
and returns
To vanish before
the noontime?
To awaken the
reeds and shatter the dew?
Greeted by
birdsong and the weeping of women?
Now the cattails
swing their heavy heads
Like drunken girls
in a bathroom mirror,
While knots of
snakes writhe between the grasses
Like half-conscious
children on the floor of a kitchen.
And the raveled
limbs of trees release their dormant cry
And cast off the
muzzle of their frigid burden.
A spotted fawn
glowing stands alert
To anticipate the
arrival
Muted as an echo
from distant time:
The world to come
calling as a whisper
Of half heard forgotten
language
From a mysterious
dark and foreign tongue;
An image upon an
image,
A promise clambered
for in the half-light
Spreading leisurely
across the canvas
To at last take
its seat and be revealed in us.
Towering rows of beige siding melts
In the haze of a plastic twilight
To recede past sight and blend with the horizon,
While miles of painted on concrete drips
Into a forever dilating
Maze of streets and thoroughfares
So vast they eclipse the sight and knowledge
Of human affairs or planning committees.
And here is the boy who clamours and shakes
To disembodied voices in the night,
Pacing endlessly through the confines of
An imperceptible part of nowhere.
Dweller of the heavens, the eternal east,
Triune Deity alone and unseen
Seated in a shroud of limitless light.
Now behold this throne in the heart of man
Who is but dust and air, a nothingness
When compared to He who is within him,
Closer than the breath and hot flowing veins.
And inwardly the sacred change affects,
As when eyes are opened and dissolve to flame,
Flying like a moth to the eternal glance,
And man is transformed by the vision gained.
There’s a peace in the touch of cold air,
And boughs that brush upon the frozen
glass,
Through it I stare into the naked wood,
And draw life from the breath of its long
rest.
Nature now walks through this long dark
passage
And all must yield to a silent repose
Under a grey sky and the falling snow,
To long last rise like the dawn of the morn.
