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This morning grackles held a vast conventicle
concatenating out of the trees like blowing
dandelion seeds. Blue- and sun- sky swells
in the tomato whose blood-juice sings
in my stomach while a cicada like a tuning-fork
thrums the sympathetic note, the om that fills the tent
light now against its stakes. Dwell, then,
on the perfection of this day whose squirrels
harangue my typewriter while the new melons' scent
weaves in and out with the broad tide of September winds.
All the woods are adrift in an atmosphere
that swings with the earth in an equipoise
to soothe the temper of tectonic plates.
Beneath the deepest calm lies violence
too mean for fears. Steady then
in the knowledge of personal extinction I revel in the sway
of the senses and take them to their limits.
A twig clatters on the canvas tympanum.
The buzz of a light plane merges with the wash of trees,
that ocean of rushing leaves, and again the cicada threads
the eye of these perceptions,
sutra-ing the old indecisons, thrumming Blake hymn:
Emerging now, the sacred text of the finite mind.
Untranslatable, yet bound in the texture of the slightest ordinary life.
Unrepeatable, yet pulsing in the most green blood of the remotest alien.
Submerged, like incoming bits from the farthest probe x-rayed in static.
Eaten, like intricate hemoglobin devoured by voracious macrophage.
Tracked and hunted in a maniacal fever by the materialist empiricist mind.
Scarred by and yet scarring the thinnest most sensitive photographic film.
Joyous in the confusion of photons passing or not passing through measured
slits.
The most simple fact, the most real you, staring you in the face.
The most sacred text of the finite mind is you, staring you in the face.
You singing in the bop-swing of the most polka'd jazz of the gone sitar.
You with the skinned knuckles and the ball-bearings falling out of the race
faster than you can curse.
You air-hammering in the streets while the traffic screams about pimps and
pushers.
You a photograph of an undernourished kid buried under turning pages.
You a tax-schemer making deductions about the white Mercedes with the superb
tits.
You an unshaven bard in a billowing tent a mile above the honest earth.
The sacred text is the wildest approximation. Approximate!
A previous version was published as "Canto Five" in the Cream City Review
(University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Vol. 9, 1984, No. 1 & 2, p.85.
Copyright 2006 by R. Virgil Ellis
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Ron writes:
