On Li Bai’s Ox Shoal

 

There are two systems of poetry—one

that is alive to the cosmic divine feminine

and the other that isn’t—being dead to it.

Consequently, the other is hardly poetry at all.

 

At the Ox Ford beneath Mount Jiuhua

that has nine-fold glories as hold for us

Mnemosyne’s Muses, Li Bai went

and with his hand he sought to grasp

the arche of the Divine Feminine

in her earthly presence, path, and end

in the owl-light and chiaroscuro clouds

by the silver shiver of tugging Luna’s bar

 

with her likeness and yen in gliding signs

which the river stream purified up high

as well as deep below picked and plonked

as shiny nacre grows round our exiled hearts.

What are you credentials?—Just a Ph.D. in Political Science

 

Ever since the Bull and his rape of Europa

the West tried hard to be the bully of the world

and to get away with it by hiding the dark truth

of wolfing the victims in some Labyrinth of Hell.

 

The whole edifice of its voodoo political science,

its science of power over all else who would not

do otherwise without it, has been developed

as tenets and wiles of the World’s Dark Prince,

 

and ever since the ancient seeming sleight of hand

that equated Plutus and Pluto, Death and Wealth,

the powers that be truly deemed deep down

 

that the ultimate power and the greatest affluence

can only come from miming and mining the savoir-

faire of the Underworld—as if all were already dead.

Once Again, the World Is Going through the Great Birth Pangs With the Deities That Moved to Conceive Their New Daughters

 

With Zeus we lost a Satyr and an Apollo

with an Artemis in one, a shower of gold,

an eagle, a flame of fire, a swan, a goose,

thus, visiting Antiope, Callisto, Danae,

Aegina (both as fire and a bird of prey),

Leda, Nemesis, and for Europa, of course,

he played a Taurus, a bull—since this God

knew how to be all these to his urbane lovers

behind his wife’s back—and for her he did

a cuckoo’s skit. And if for anything, then

for this one thing Zeus must be praised—

he was the last God of the West who didn’t

refuse to have besides sons—and having quite

few of these—daughters! even daughters! too!