On Plutarch’s Obsolescence of the Divine Oracles

 

Revel and mirth—rim to rim

is it where existence rushing

to enter only to exit is clasped,

enfolded by the shadow of a dream

 

when one lucky verse or a mere nod

that tilts the earth along with her head

can tap the streaming joy and so they tip

the heavy hollowness of soulless death?

 

Then let it be this: as in poetry, so in love,

in the fullness of the presence that grows deep,

it’s where a soul does truly meet a soul and lives.

 

And here too is the key to the Obsolescence

of the Divine Oracles—once lovers and poets

get it right—Gods too will assent again to sing!

 

Rudolf Matys 1938-2023

 

Sometime around 1990

during our first talks

by a glass of wine,

just across the street

 

from Czech Radio Vltava,

Rudolf Matys, the great bibliophile

and bibliosoph of Czech poetry

and its living 20th century memory,

 

told me the strange story of Turkish POWs

from the Korean War—those were the only ones

who withstood and survived undamaged

the Northern Korean version of MK-Ultra,

 

the utter isolation and sensory deprivation 

except for a simple shake and mere human touch

from a commissar who took off for that occasion

his leather glove in addition to a smile.

 

All the others betrayed their countries

and went insane and soon they died

of what the brain couldn’t stand or take

—except for these hardened,

 

somehow never broken Turks.

And the secret of that feat?

Their cells were blank and void—

void of anything—but for a carpet

 

hanging on the wall, and unlike all

the others, only the Turks had their eye

trained and versed and read

in following the thread

 

that wove the carpet’s patterned plan,

thus preserving their mind whole, intact,

and not going amuck or berserk

into a chasm and chaos of no return.

 

And as poetry so in life and music

some souls can and do still follow

beauty’s and the order’s thread,

and grace in them still perseveres,

 

preserving the presence

both of mind and soul

as long as it can be meted out

to mortals in this world.

 

And isn’t illiteracy blind

to the splendor of the divine light

that holds the breath of life tethered

to the body’s limbs both ill and evil too?

 

November 2021