Some Must Have Been Adept Musicians and Painters Who Could Have Competed Against Heraclitus’ Knowledge and Art of Measure and Proportion

 

—How many times (and lifetimes) are we

removed from the true Universal Medium?

 

Embellished with riddles’

adornments of the ever,

deemed flowery and rare,

pure and rich, femmes enter

give-and-take ringlets

of well-polished speech,

 

measure by measure

kindled and kindling

what they hint and offer                                                            

and thus quietly gripped

in reedy tongues

of ever-living flames,

 

themselves so delivered

then as creatrixes of melts

side by side with solids

with grades of lightning-flash

by which earth is liquefied

and what went down

 

begins rising back

till it cools again

into lucent drips

or pearls hardened

in the clasping shells.

“Is this how the cosmic

 

binds and interacts

with the matter

on this earthly plane?”

perhaps only the naïve

or some with a keener sense

could be made to ask.

 

But the key is “measured,”

and to measure is to ally,

align, array well—as if

in accordance with a God

who taught: “No excess,”

since going past would

 

corrupt even those immortals;

and thus women who know

open and weave the ways

of thinnest of the highways

for presence that is always

into beads of such here and now.