Leaf by leaf, shade by shade.
Surely, the ancients held
that Hades, the world’s
great hollow of no return,
is an ekklēsiá or qahal
where shades, slid off light
like passé skins of snakes,
are called and congregate,
and those joyless shades
from whom all sense fled
were human souls
seized and delivered
as game to death
in which “all is vain” —
as complete, chronic slaves
to the Lord who’s himself
a Shade of Every Shade —
hence a dark and timeless secret:
to enslave a human, bestowed
even with a divine soul,
slice his seeing light
to a thin and narrow shade —
small-minded as can be,
and, as Socrates says
in the final book of the Republic,
tyrannies are found
at the distance
of trice-scaled
and cut-down shades —
shades of shades of shades
and hence as space shrunk
to a speck or spot,
a figure of a triple death —
or death bloated in reverse,
from a point to complete space,
a lethal latch of deadness
that paints as Hegel did his “cows”—
black on black in black
where only an owl of a goddess
knows, seeing through
the torn-up spirits’ dismal end.
And between Sheol and Teufel
Shadday is the Lord,
The Cleaver of the Presence
into what is not,
darkness bred with void.
And there is thus also double art —
tracing of a likeness’ semblance,
one that casts and copies
dies of vicious, soulless death
through its spells and shades
and the other—as beauty drawn
like a figure to its sublime breath.
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