Many people enter words or even verses
fully clothed, and some in the buff
as if on their way to Eden or some
Persian garden held for Paradise
or—just refreshed going out
as happens when the words
and the verses all the more
alight with pearls, corals
like a necklace on a skin
threaded into coiled-up gleam.
For some words or even verses
are like crystal fountain spills
which to enter and to delight in,
one must be a bloom unfolded too.
“When the charioteer sees that face,
his memory is carried back.”
Phaedrus 254b
By driving ever closer to the divine
we go on growing a scrap of wings,
and within its reach and within sight,
something akin makes us die in fright.
And thus dead to the dead in love,
we learn how to stalk and track
signs of summons, striking steps,
training ears, schooling eyes.
For without the soul or love,
any art is but a hollow husk,
and the soul has something
of the sacred quiddity of art
which to be had must be tried,
used & coupled with one’s heart.
A cloud is anchored by the mountain
che non c'è ancora whereby the morphe,
the outward look of the inner pith,
stunning, pleads for stunning eyes,
just as patience is what passion asks
if a marvel, wonder, beauty’s charm,
is to ever live on in one’s timeless art
instead of dying as a will-o'-the-wisp
for what is long and slow in coming by
is undoubtedly meant to plumb and gauge
how much or how little of the timeless
and of the immortal do we have in us
for it takes quite much as opposed to less
for giving birth to what even death can’t alter.
