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The Moon Isn't Renewing Her Virginity

The moon isn't renewing her virginity
in the snakepits of the hypocrites
faking the wavelengths of their radiance
like the black dwarf of an imploding commune
that flared out like graverobbers in the dark
desecrating a cemetery of rainbows.

I've watched the silver shovel of your tongue
go through all phases of the moon, from full
to new, as if you were laying your Tarot cards
out on the table for an autopsy on the Hanged Man.
This one's suspended by one leg with a real rope
around his neck. You're decked out in dreamcatchers
and spider silk like the butterfly bling of a pimp.
What are you selling? Peace, love, and happiness
at the expense of all else? You chirp you love everyone
but you've never loved people enough to learn
how to hate them honestly. There heretics burn

but you're attuned to harmony like a snaketongue
of black lightning is to a tuning fork or a lyre
to the laryngeal cords of a cheesecutter.
You're a wedding cake full of worms. You're
a wishbone with one hip lower than the other
like the short end of the stick, a black capped chickadee
on the lowest rung of the crutch. You emanate.
You radiate. You resonate. You alert
your sleeping brother like a fire alarm
to the god waking up within him, but you exclude,
you forget, you reject the real shamans
dancing in the shadows of their solitude with a limp.

If you cram any more beauty into your eyes
soon you'll be able to open a jewellery store.
God knows how you can love the silver
and hate the ore that poured itself out
like wine for you as if it were bleeding to death
like wild grapes going sour in your mouth.
There's more salvation in drinking
from your own skull, than sipping
like a hummingbird from someone else's grail.
You're just baling a moonboat with a black sail
and a bucket the bottom hasn't fallen out of yet.
Dew blooming on the tips of the tongues
of the stargrass, yes, but you can't conceive
of the watershed of the abyss it was drawn from.

Your moondogs don't snarl enough to guard
the farmyard from the predators that surround you.

You're water gilding Dachau with a silver lining
whenever you look at a black cloud pluming
into the night sky like a fumarole
of mystically unique people going up in smoke
and white wash the dark side of things
desecrating their suffering by remarking
how wonderful it is their ashes kiss your eyelids
like gentle snowflakes of human flesh and bone.
Your third eye's got a cinder in it like a stake
driven into the iris of a Cyclops. You denigrate
the black ops that rescued the rest of the flock
from the cave, like a shepherd moon
that's never known an eclipse it didn't resent.

The blood and dirt under the fingernails of the moon
aren't the terraced gardens of an Incan ruin.
If you're looking for a needle in a haystack
of sunbeams make sure you don't stick it in the eye
of that voodoo doll you carry around with you
like the strawdog of a scarecrow at a harvest ritual
that's eventually going to go up in heretical flames
like Joan of Arc, the witch, not the saint,
once her white magic grew irrationally ineffectual.

Most people look for the light to see in the dark.
Rinse the night from your mirroring consciousness
and you throw the stars out with the womb water
of Aquarius. In the urn of what's left, not
the translucency of self-cleaning jewels
as if your eyes were constantly buffing
their own windows with vinegar
and yesterday's newspaper full of atrocities
that wipe the filth like sunspots off your shining
like a patina of print on the faces of the chimney sweepers
scraping the creosote and shovelling the ashes
of the fireflies out of the furnace. Not enlightenment.
But the putrefied residue in the alembic of a bad alchemist,
trying to mine gold from lead like a thief of honey
from an ant heap of spectacles, and gleaming ingots of teeth.

poem by Patrick White
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Autumn Swings Its Bell

Autumn swings its bell like an eyelid over my heart
and in the penumbral umbrellas that bloom
in a garden of eclipses and sundials,
I discuss you with an enlightened ghost
and an ignorant shadow
that have learned to see star to star
in this echoless abyss of silence and solitude.
Within, where the winds scrawl
their spray bombs on the wall,
delighted with their literary delinquency,
I realize what's beginning to look like
the mouthless howl of an ancient agony,
the collapsed bridge
of that which was separated
from the moon's reflection,
an ache deep in the ores of the earth
before it learned to speak of trees and rivers,
before its longing invested the dead branch
with a fugue of nightbirds
trying to write themselves like a dream
into the black candle of the darkness
with a feather of fire.
My heart is hollow, and empty,
a drunk in an oildrum,
and love seems nothing more
than a harvest of eyelashes
and all my works are seeds on the moon.
A kite crash lands in the powerlines.
A phoenix rises from its dearth of ashes.
I want to go deeper into myself,
I don't want to hover like smoke
over my sidereal cremations,
or atomize the particulars
of how time bends like the arms
of my galactic alarm clocks,
or if I deserve to be this lonely,
a lighthouse that went on shining underwater
after the last flood carried me out to sea.
You make things happen in me,
thinking of you, your lapidary tides,
blue species of emotion
are born, evolve, and die
for reasons unknown
in the space between two thoughts;
and there are crazy black spiders in the wine
that tempt me to swallow them
to know how things are connected,
and always an electric dawn
to dazzle the event with black holes
and blind, astronomical photographers.
I feel the tenderness of time and distance from you,
fountains that no one drinks from,
and space all the jewels and palaces of water
that no one owns or lives in
because they are reserved for your progress alone
through these wounded labyrinths of me
following the stars I've laced
in the wake of living your way free of the maze
that will prove to be
the foundation of another kind of temple,
the cornerstone of a vastly more intimate space
than the eclipse that encloses you now
in the bleeding flames of an endangered poppy.
I wish I were wise, I wish
I were young and becoming,
I wish I could engender a planet
out of this cosmic debris
I spew like a supernova across the night,
the exhalation of my spirit from the lamp I go by,
the arraying of the world in every breath.
I wish I were good and always cooling
on a farmhouse windowsill;
I wish I was not so tormented
by the torn skies that hang from the broken window
I hurled my heart through like a stone with a message.
I wish my enlightenment
didn't knock on every door of delusion
hoping to find no one home.
I place the cool kiss of a nocturnal snail on your skin,
and I look at the words and I wonder
if you'll wake with a silver smear on your breast
like the path of the moon on water
and know it was me
or feel the tremor of a forbidden ecstasy in your sleep
I burn a church to the ground like a ram
to honour the altar of your talent,
the passion, pulse, and fire-voice of your poetry
and the midnight shadows of your blue rose
shedding its eyelids like petals, skin and sky.
My words are metal birds, rocks
wishing for wings
so that this avalanche of mountain thunder
might once take flight in the dusk
toward the valley where you wander like a stream
turning over lost echoes
like the links of a chain with a key,
zeroes looping arms with the past
to bind one moment of the infinite
to the wonder of a passion that lasts.
My eyes are heavier
for having seen the light,
saturated with everything they've witnessed,
honey, ink, and blood,
and every tear is a sea closer to the moon,
and every lyrical efflorescence of the dream
is punctured by thorns,
and even the lies of the most subtle mirrors
have grown obvious
as the beast within is saddened
by its cultivated charm,
knowing what hour it is.
Understand me well
in this rogue season of awareness;
where lightning freezes in the flower-realms
and breaks like branches of ice,
where even black is too garish for clarity,
and sometimes even the sea
loses its nerve,
gaping into its own depths,
an asylum of lightless shapeshifters
for a likeness of itself
that isn't perfectly preserved,
the locket-heart of the last fish on the moon,
a Martian meteor in Antarctica,
this gravel walk of asteroids
through the gates and the gardens
of the whole planet I am in every piece,
though I do not glow like fool's gold
in the pan of the night,
and my throne has crumbled like hard bread,
and love seems to die at the first affirmation
like a bird against a late night windowpane,
this goblet of darkness
that stains the lips with an indelible silence;
though I have been deconstructed
by the suspicious sphericity
of my most cherished symmetries,
toppled like a tower of blood and water,
a shattered river
condemned to the beginning of spring,
a continent sunk in the depths of the mirror
barring this handful of nuggets and islands,
I am still immutable diamond
that learned its flowing from the stars,
and what I write to you
is not a thread of light
that holds the kite of your heart
up to the lightning like a key
to prove that your blood is a good conductor,
not the severed fishing line necklace of eyes
scattered like beads and dice
across the usual geometries
and impoverished granaries of the floor,
not the afterbirth of a morphological wine
that left you burnt orchards
as the fruits of the fire that promised
a feast of pears and cherries,
not the disembodied jewels of a ghost
weeping in the doorway of its skull in the night,
but the threshold and theme,
though for the moment you disdain the stairwells
in the hovels and mansions of love,
embittered by the lonely rose of space and matter
that pours the shining out the backdoor
like the lees of harvest stars
in the corner of the eye of an irisless bell
waking you up mutely
from a dream of falling in a morgue,
but the threshold and theme,
the story-line, the mythogem and motif,
the oceanic pulse and spume
of sidereal ferocities and urgent follies
robed like the king of shells
in the bruised purple of symbols
I take like the pulse of a lightning-rod
rooted like blood in me
to know as constantly as space
that I draw my life from you
like a shadow in a garden of blue fire
that courses through the dried creek beds
of these hourglass deserts
like the mystic tents
of a caravan of rain on the moon.
Wells, goblets, bells, or roses,
or thorns gnawing through chains and lifelines
to let the heart drift
like an empty boat from its moorings,
whatever season you assume
like the changing wardrobes
and unassailable affinities of a life
you must improvise as you go along,
I will always be with you
like shadows and leaves
and footprints and stars,
as I am now your next breath
whatever the scarves of fire
that grace your ghost-dance
with the black ribbons of an abysmal freedom
that feels like the halls of an abandoned prison.
I will liberate the key
like a hanged man
from the noose that adorns your neck,
and raise myself like a bell to your lips
and have you drink
the light and stars and flowers again
from the urn, the crown,
the hive of the heart
that sends its eyes out into a far field like bees
on the perfume trail of a summer constellation
to sweeten the light around you
with honey that burns for an emergent queen to find it.

poem by Patrick White
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Rapunzel

Ha, open wide
All so good Ill eat you
Take me for a ride
In your sweet delicious,
Perfect little mouth
There upon I linger
You will have no doubt
Ill do my best for you Ill do
Love...
Lets stop to get it going
Lost myself just thinking
bout the two of us
From each other drinking
Begin with the lips
Fingertips and kissing
Turn me inside out
I do my best for you
Up and down we go
From the top you push me
This is such a thrill
Lost in love and dancing
Shake your tamborine
You blow my head open
Of one thing for sure
I do my best for you Ill do
For you I would crawl
Through the darkest dungeon
Climb the castle wall
If your my rapunzel
You let down your hair
Right in through your window
Good they locked the door cuz
Ill do my best for you Ill do
I think the world of you
All of my heart I do
Blood through my veins for you
You alone have all of me
I give my world to you
To you Ill be true
From you my strength is full
To carry your burdens too
Too good to be real
Smell of something cooking
You my soul to steal
Food of love were filling
What youve given me
For it there is no measure
Of one thing I am sure
Ill give my best for you
Hip lock up so tight
You know drive me crazy
Crazy is alright
With you lookin at me
You make me feel high
Every single thing you do to me
Is like Im drunk
Given me given me
The shiver

song performed by Dave Matthews Band
Added by Lucian Velea
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You Are Crazy

You are crazy and beautiful
and wounded and wild
and the youngest daughter
of a coven of poetic sea-witches,
and dangerous as the moon in your changes,
the fragrance of night
hovering over the blue star-honey
of your seductive hive of candles,
the skulls you drink from naked,
anointing the fire
with libations of blood and wine,
dancing to the passionate lament
of ancient serpents
unfolding their wings
like eras in the lives of stars,
constellations that have come and gone like leaves,
seasons that are only distant whispers
in the hourglass of the hills,
voices that have outlived the ears to hear them.
And we are no more contained
than is the wind, the white cloud
in our approach to lucidity,
and we have been wave and shore
many times for each other already,
and I have heard how
the night flute of your solitude
suffers like an island,
and the wizards have worked
an extra contemplative shift
to make you the gift of a gate
when my love of you
alloys my will
to the light of the urgency.
There is a wholeness to your being such that
even when the night shatters like a mirror,
all of you is reflected in every piece,
and your eye at the keyhole
unfolds me like a starchart
trying to locate a deep sky object
burning ferociously in wavelengths of black.
I am enrobed in your mystery like a waterfall
and you swim, a silver fish,
through the roots of my mind like the moon,
and the shadow of every thought
is a likeness of you
that I’ve conjured out of space like an aurora,
a feather of smoke
to limn your features mystically
in apricot-violet fires that flower like paint
and I take you away with me sometimes
where I can savour you alone like a mountain
where the silence prowls like a cougar
and you keep the wilderness to yourself
and your presence is enough of a fountain
to turn my heart into a mouth
entranced into speaking in the tongues
of the hidden grammars of blood
that pi the spirit with golden ratios
and passionate incommensurables.
You are a star caught
in the curtains of my seeing
and we are only eyelids away
from finding a flower
worthy of the sight
as you seed the darkness with light,
and I carve your face,
your transformative beauty,
out of a block of eyeless uranium
that glows invisibly like an emotion
that only blooms in exile,
a genius among elements
that gives herself away
like an orchard in a storm,
a serpent in the labyrinth,
the blessing of a weapon.
How could I know you in any other words;
how could I win the trust of your riddles
and climb the stairs of your neglected shrines
to the reluctant priestess
chanting in the shadows
of her own eclipsed altars
for a sacrifice that would answer
the impiety of a lifetime?
If I don’t touch you there,
if you don’t feel my breath upon the nape of your neck
like the wind on a lake,
if your blood
doesn’t turn into a red light district
without emergency exits
at the thought of being caressed
on the other side of your skin,
on the other side of the tapestry,
how could the hidden clarity
ripen into the crazy wisdom
of the bird that was born of a jewel
and you exceed yourself like wings?
You are all flavours of the fire
that bewitches the tongue of the snake
to divine the air for grails of water
with a branch of conscious lightning
that wants to taste you through its fingertips
like a note in a tuning fork
that will open the dark gate of your radiance
like the key to a secret release.
And I know how often
love is a dream in a graveyard
where only the rootless flowers say
what they can about severance
and the abyss of the heart that falls from its crown,
and the urgent vacancy of a throne
that governs lying down
beat like grief against the cageless door of a cold stove;
I have wept on stone,
trying to make a lie come true,
a mirage turn solid,
a ray of light linger in my bloodstream
like a locket dropped from a bridge,
I have been the timely extinction
of mystic alarms
that woke me early to grief
and what the thief left of my afterlife,
and I have been the razorblade,
the knife that bled to death,
that cut itself out like the tongue of a wound
rather than inflict a law upon love
that would tin the waterlilies
with savage indignation.
I have made one infinity of two zeroes,
and handcuffed myself
to the top of a tree
to throw the pack of chainsaws
that chased me up it like a scared messiah
off the scent of blood
that rippled through the heartwood,
and climbed down
like a quiet last judgment
when nobody was around
and stood in the doorway of my grave
like a letter delivered to the wrong address,
and cursed myself
for all the things I couldn’t save.
I have tried to knit honey
from the smoke of the fire
that spread like pollen over the fields,
but it was always tainted
by the taste of a black saint
retreating into a starless night
like the shadow of a bird
that had nothing to sing to the dawn.
And I withdrew from life
like the cult of virulent addiction
and lived like a ghost in detox
parsing planets like flaws on a rosary
and idling among the late night shadows on the walls
like a stone fish among the reeds.
And my name
was a word in a foreign language
I didn’t understand
until you said it like a wind of light
that had wandered like a road through time
to breathe me again
and pick my body up like a lost glove
lying by the lifelines in the wineskin valleys of your hand.
Until you were you
among the veils and interpretations,
black swan enthroned in a sky of fire,
the ghost of a bell
in the rain mirror
that arrayed your face like a whisper of islands,
I had never looked into my own eyes
as if they belonged to someone else.

poem by Patrick White
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Trying To Put Some Distance

Trying to put some distance between myself and my past
is like trying to stale-mate a cloud with a mountain
by resorting to the last hope of all experienced liars,
objectivity. Third person singular pronouns,
he, she, it. Shipping containers from alien places
stacked neatly on the dock
like coffins and cord wood
you can talk and write about as if
you weren't buried in anyone of them
and none of the stowaways
and none of the illegal immigrants
and none of the corpses
were anymore related to you
than Cantonese graffiti from Seattle that rode the rails
all the way to Jakarta like one long sentence
about something you dreamed last night in your sleep.
Somebody's else's views in somebody elses' language.
You can stand on one side of the tracks
in the red glare of the most serious-minded lights
at the road block with the crossed swords
and half-bored with waiting for things to pass
read the story of your life on the sides
of the train going past gene by gene
in the most unlikely couplings of a chromosome.
You can read your own genome
like beads in the rosary you're kneading
between your thumb and your forefinger
as if you were counting the prophetic skulls
of the full moons that have passed
without any sign of a harvest on an abacus.
You can hide your past under the death mask of someone else.
You can play scrabble with the sign of the zodiac
you were born under,
you can rearrange your stars
and lie to your scars about which among many wounds
was their real birth mother,
you can spin a new myth of origin like a changeling
to explain why your axis is tilted beneath the equator
but when you're finishing patching over to another gang
and you've got new top and bottom rockers
and a brand new mandala on your back to empower you
and your winding down the Malahat on Vancouver Island
that writhes along the side of the mountain
like a snake with its head pinned by your front wheel fork
two hundred feet above the tiny eyelids
of the waves with the white lashes
on the surface of the sea below,
thinking of Jefferson Airplane's
tongue in cheek retort to John Donne
that no man's an island.
He's the Saanich Peninsula
though they didn't say Saanich
but if the peninsula fits wear it
and that's where I was at the time.
You can tear the wire you've been wearing
like the narrative of your life
as if your own mind were listening in on you
from another room in the hotel across the street
and your silence would still provide enough evidence
to prosecute you for living outside the box
instead of just sitting in it
and trying to think of a way out.
All those improbable entrances with impossible exits
you walked through to change your life irreparably
like some crude street rendition
of the Eleusinian Mysteries in Edmonton
just to verify your right to exist
in a world that rejected its own extremities
like the left hand of fate and circumstance.
And it wasn't so much the actuality you were after,
that would come of its own accord
like an apple after the blossom,
but just the mere chance
of being someone you weren't
who wasn't burnt and bitter
wary, angry, cruelly clear-sighted
as a spider-mount on a telescope
waiting to catch stars in the webs
of the glimmering constellations
they mistook for dreamcatchers.
Every cubic centimetre of me back then
as dense and intense as a black dwarf
that sucked all the light out of the air
so that even in broad daylight
I always felt this darkness within me
like a night too heavy for the world to bear.
My mind was always a wavelength shy of a snake pit
when I was around other people
that hadn't been chronically humiliated
by growing up poor
and my heart would condemn itself out of hand
just to deny them the privilege
of doing it for themselves eventually
and to show them the difference between
a passive scapegoat and a demonized pariah
that wouldn't hesitate to use his horns
on any matador of the moon
who thought he had the crescents for it.
Alone under the microscope
I furnished my solitude like a habitable planet
with converging mindstreams
that carried me out to sea
like an empty lifeboat
drifting down the Milky Way
like a leaf, like a poem, like
a deep insight into the radiance of nothing
as soon as it got dark enough to see the stars.
Out of the void I sought shelter in
emerged a truce of aloof familiars
who were multilingually conversant
with my kind of madness and imagination.
And I called them Azazel, Blue Flower, Black Dog,
Dead Dog's Dream Self, Character and Womanpit,
and of the ones that appeared the most benign
one was a mystically empowered altruistic idiot,
one was the tabla rasa Adamic blank slate of everyman
and one the female sister demon of my right brain
that was dark and artistic and long-suffering.
And of the first magnitude black hole constellations
with eyes like dice pricked out like fang marks
on an occult starmap of dark matter,
one was a Satanic standard bearer
who had gone from being a scapegoat
to being the master of a Renaissance of evil
with the Machiavellian curiosity of a reptile
intrigued by its deepening insight into mammals
and the other two were the black farces
of their own burnt out legends
passively-aggressive as extinct volcanoes
growling at each other
in the nightmare of their waking hours
like fortune-cookies strung out along the same fault line
like junkies who rage at the futures
that keeping give up on them
like a species that knows its endangered
all the way from southern California
through West Vancouver up to Alaska.
There's a big part of everyone
that wasn't born of man or woman
when they're alone with their own cartoons
and the mythic inflation and deflation of themselves
makes them feel the whole universe
is breathing along in unison with them
between rapturous moments of solar exhilaration
and dead seabeds of lunar depression
like a musician with his finger on the pulse
of the copulating wavelengths
of a blues guitar in heat at high tide
he's going to ride out like providence into the flood.
These were my Sahaba,
my lost tribe of desert companions,
the nightwinds that came all wrapped in black
like lone Tuareg out of the southern Libyan Sahara
like dark energy in a whirlwind of stars
ready to kill you from a great distance
for drawing the waters of life
out of one of their wells
without tribal consent.
And who knows what flows down into the mind
from what mountaintops
or through the valleys of whose heart before you?
Maybe there's some leftover starlight in the mix
and the taste of a full moon
lingering on the tongue of a corpse
like a coin some loved one put there
like a sacred syllable to protect it against the dark.
And the tears of someone you never knew
for things you're not aware of
crying like a waterclock from life to life
like the dream theme of a mindstream
that keeps the whole thing together
like the loose thread of a flying carpet
that just keeps on unravelling.
Life is a geriatric medium with a young message.
The oasis mentors the mirage
like a dance company rehearses Swan Lake.
Dark matter is strung out through the universe
like a junkie neurally connected to the same mind
we all are the way water is to intelligence and lucidity.
We're all drinking from the same mindstream
in our own skull.
And when I pass mine around
like a sacred chalice of the moon
around a common fire
to each of my familiars and anti-selves
thrown together in this desert of stars
like symbols that made a habit of each other
for mutual survival,
the big question
that's always greeted with silence
is whether life's an exorcism or a seance.
Were we driven out of somewhere
we all long for
for things we can't recall
to never be summoned back,
or were we invited here
by an anonymous unresponsive host
possessed by his own imagination
to guess at who or what he might be
so the hidden secret can know itself
in every one of us?
And I ask myself creatively
is the potential for darkness
greater than the reality of light?
Is the one infinite
and the other doomed to be exhausted
by living it one insight at a time
some with the lifespan of stars
some like fireflies and lightning
some in the shadows of black walnut trees
and some like me
who dream under the eyelids of past eclipses
like a dragon who once swallowed
a black cosmic egg whole
to bring rain to the new moon
without putting its ancient root fires out?

poem by Patrick White
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Meditations In A Snake Pit Of Dissonant Wavelengths

Meditations in a snake pit of dissonant wavelengths.
An anti-Zen photo-op of enlightened dark energy.
Does a clean slate mean
there’s no starlight in the windows,
no fossils in the Burgess Shale,
no kings with any grave goods in any of these hills?
And I suppose I forgave you some time ago
but if I did
you’ll forgive me if I forgot.
Things have been intense over the past few years.
I’ve been living secretly underground like a nail
driven into the heartwood of an old growth forest
I don’t want them to cut down
whether it’s the tree on the moon
or Clayquot Sound.
Most people’s relationships
are mediocre books with purple passages.
Ours was a purple book with all the pictures torn out.
And that’s o.k. too, and that’s o.k. too,
and that’s o.k. too
I keep repeating like a mantra to myself
trying to zone out into a trance
that helps me feel as numb as a frozen gum
whenever I remember you in moonlight
with my eyes half shut
and my heart not as wide open as it used to be.
My eyes focus on a memory but it seems
they’re just seeing for show
and there’s no insight in it
neither they nor I want the courage to know.
And I guess it’s you I’m talking to here
or this simulacrum of what I remember of you
that’s kept on growing inside me
like a ghost that hasn’t made its peace with me yet
or maybe just this void I imagine
among billions of eyes
has yours in it too
and the way things are inchoately connected
somehow resonates vestigially
on the same wavelength you and I used to.
But even if nothing and no one are there anymore
that’s o.k., that’s o.k., that’s o.k., too.
I’m not going to break my teeth on a koan with a time-lock
I’m not going to give myself a concussion
knocking on a door from the inside
to get someone to open it and let me out.
The last time I did that
you were the storm that took me in again.
You were the third eye of the hurricane
and I was the star you washed out of it
because you couldn’t make it fit
that cocaine constellation
you liked to buff with fairy dust
before you took it to the streets
to find a black market for inspiration.
I was never desperate enough in those days
to keep up with you in your moodswings
so I tried to get behind you and push
your voice out onto a stage equal to your talent
and you wowed them. You did.
You had them standing up on the tables
and afraid to come out of the green room.
And I especially liked it when you dedicated
Walking in the Rain to me
and ever since I’ve listened to it
like a gnostic gospel I buried in the desert
to keep from using it like a sacred text to start a fire.
Hey, but two days later you turned from a hit
into an atomic albino Queen Cobra Apache-Aztec witch
with your fangs stuck like a wishbone
in the throat of your voice coach
for not singing as well as he listens
to what the lyrics of your raving hysterics meant
between the lines when you were coming down
like a junkie in a decaying orbit
that didn’t make it all the way to the moon.
Living with you then
once you got back on the blow
was like walking across a mine field
covered in blood-stained snow.
A black rose with the bite of a rattlesnake.
The thorns of a Yaqui mesquite cactus
like the tongue piercings of a prophetic skull
trying to make itself known
like a hidden secret in a savage language
written on flesh and bone.
Remember that night you slashed my sportsjacket
down the spine with one eagle-feathered swoop of the knife
for doing the dishes that had sat
growing green mould like alien life
in a junkyard of contaminated space parts
because you didn’t want to be taxed like a dealer
with the same chores as everyone else?
I liked painting all night at the kitchen table
with you watching me
like a kataba worm at the bottom of a bottle of tequila
wondering whether I was toxic to eat or not.
I painted you four by six foot love notes
on square-riggers of canvas that ran before the wind
like the skull and crossbones from the slower angel fleets
trying to regain command of their own lifeboats
to rescue our relationship.
But that’s o.k. that’s o.k., that’s o.k., too.
I’ve deepened my perspective
like a shipwreck on the moon
inundated by shadows below deck
with none of my water gates and fire walls in tact.
It took more light years traversing the void
without a point of origin or destination
to ever make me feel off course
because in any dimension
and every direction
one move was as good as another
before the cosmic mystery
dwindled into the mundane fact
of the aerial perspective I put behind me
when I painted time blue to keep it in the distance.
Just as I was happy you were gone with our son
like d.n.a. evidence
we did have something to say to each other once
before the house burned down with me in it
spitting into the ashes of a demonic failure
to immolate me at the stake of a familial heresy
while the birds were dropping in mid flight
at forty below outside.
I was far from a daycare father
but I hoisted him up on my shoulders in pride
as if the weight of the world were nothing
but the bubble of a laughing boy
goading an elephant with no sense of gravity
into a full gallop before he starts flapping his ears.
But that’s o.k., that’s o.k., that’s o.k. too.
If you walk it long enough alone
you’ll find there’s more dust on the road
than you’ve got tears to keep it down.
People might want to cling to your skin like cornerstones
and you might rather want to be keel-hauled on the moon
than wash your hands of them.
Sometimes the heart thinks it’s indelible.
The stars have fixed the tats for life
and all you’ve got to do is connect the dots
to see what constellations have been revealed
as signs of love’s misplaced centricity.
And then one day gone.
Just gone.
Who knows where?
There was a bubble, a gravitational eye,
A birthday balloon full of laughing gas,
a shepherd moon with an oceanic vision of life,
the impression of scarlet lipstick
like rose petals on a white kleenex
beside a make-up mirror
that managed your campaign of faces
like a drug cartel running for mayor of Shangrila.
Glacial ages of archival snowfall
sublimate like dry ice into thin air
like dreamers at their own exorcism
like the ghosts of wild swans
evaporating off the Rideau in the morning
without warning, one moment there, incredibly
the waterbirds, the light, the shapeshifting clouds,
the pudgy hands of a child
that hasn’t yet learned to make a fist
and the body of a woman with a taped wrist.
A fish jumps and disappears like a comet
back into a starmap of black holes
that plumbs the depths of your soul
from top to bottom
like skin-divers dragging the river
for the corpses of nightclub owners in Hull.
Forgiven, forgotten, foretold and fulfilled,
no more bones to make of it,
when you weren’t the blue lapis lazuli mask
of a jaguar goddess in heat
you prowled nocturnally like a smile
through shady emotions on the bestial floor
and you killed, not so much out of appetite
or to propitiate some ancient instinct in blood
but for the thrill of it, the rush, the ride
because you could, just because you could.
And no divinity was served.
You didn’t sleep with men.
You dragged them off into the bushes by their necks.
And that’s o.k., that’s o.k., that’s o.k. too.
The last time I saw you
you were draping yourself like an oilslick
over the shoulders of a bad movie
who was trying to man up among coke dealers
in a nightclub where people danced out of desperation
because everyone there had the lifespan
of a photo-op in the fast lane.
You wanted me to see
though I thought you overstated it a bit
how wonderful it was to be free of me
and spend the rest of your afterlife in theatre.
You couldn’t have been pleased
to see me with another woman
though I swear I didn’t know
you were going to be there.
I made a cold truce with the world’s brutality
and moved deep into the country
to mime the moonlight on the winter snow
where fate ran a cleaner casino than destiny.
At least the mouse knew
when it was being torn into pieces of Orphic meat
as the fragrance of hot blood steamed starward
it wasn’t being consumed by a coke rage
and the owl needed to eat.
A thousand re runs of that night
have tempted me to say something magnanimous
and make a gracious bow from the audience
as I headed for the emergency exit
knowing that was it for good between us
and what was left could only get worse.
Time is a stem cell in a shopping mall
that waits like a terrorist in all of us
outside an abortion clinic
for the right opportunity
to replicate the lack of heart
that just couldn’t go through with it.
Born in fire eventually
the salamander grows back its tail
to keep the phoenix intrigued
with the resurrection of its body parts.
No need to talk of a soul.
The fire-pits are full of bloodless abstractions
that burn without smoke or flame
like the jinn in the Koran
some good some bad
some grant wishes like new lamps for old
and some are weaving snakey emeralds
into the imageless wavelengths of their flying carpets
to tie up loose ends in their threadbare snake pits
by looking for live embers
in the ashes of a long firewalk
and more in the way of a Zen mondo
than a black mass in the way I put them out
to see more clearly what I’m stepping on in the dark
than I used to give a second thought to
and be able to say with genuine conviction
even if I do by some mistake
that’s o.k., that’s o.k., that’s o.k. too.
Namu amida butsu.
Given all I lived through with you
it’s easy for a retroactively enlightened man
to understand why you had to lie to stay true to your public.
You had the radioactive charisma
of a terrorist movie star up for an Oscar.
And I was the donkey you wanted to smuggle your amps in.
I may be slow, but I’m as thorough as a fuse-box
when it comes to snake charming circuit-breakers
so that the lights go out
long before the music’s over
and the real stars emerge from hiding
from the aftermath of your blazing
with google maps and cellphones.
There are darker intensities
and gentler lucidities
wired in parallel to the universe
like black matter to our synaptic neurons.
I snapped out of you like a lightning bolt
but it hurt to wake up from a coma and learn
you’d gone off like an i.e.d. after the big event.
Things that shine for themselves
like the light of a dream
chemiluminescent fish
in the sunless depths of the sea
or the T Tauri stars in the Pleiades
are better seen with the spotlight off than on.
And I don’t know why.
Maybe you suffered from stagefright
and overacted
but you always killed the messenger
by sending a lighthouse
to do the job of a firefly
when a blasting cap in a beaver dam
would have done the same collateral damage.
But that’s o.k., that’s o.k., that’s o.k. too.
Two fools saw their names in light.
The bright one reached up for stardom.
The dark one looked down for insight.
The donkey looks into the well.
The well looks back at the donkey.
And things just go off by themselves.

poem by Patrick White
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Hyperion. Book I

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung above his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds
Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips.

Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went,
No further than to where his feet had stray'd,
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
While his bow'd head seem'd list'ning to the Earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.

It seem'd no force could wake him from his place;
But there came one, who with a kindred hand
Touch'd his wide shoulders, after bending low
With reverence, though to one who knew it not.
She was a Goddess of the infant world;
By her in stature the tall Amazon
Had stood a pigmy's height: she would have ta'en
Achilles by the hair and bent his neck;
Or with a finger stay'd Ixion's wheel.
Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx,
Pedestal'd haply in a palace court,
When sages look'd to Egypt for their lore.
But oh! how unlike marble was that face:
How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.
There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun;
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its stored thunder labouring up.
One hand she press'd upon that aching spot
Where beats the human heart, as if just there,
Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain:
The other upon Saturn's bended neck
She laid, and to the level of his ear
Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake
In solemn tenor and deep organ tone:
Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue
Would come in these like accents; O how frail
To that large utterance of the early Gods!
'Saturn, look up!--though wherefore, poor old King?
I have no comfort for thee, no not one:
I cannot say, 'O wherefore sleepest thou?'
For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth
Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God;
And ocean too, with all its solemn noise,
Has from thy sceptre pass'd; and all the air
Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,
Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house;
And thy sharp lightning in unpractised hands
Scorches and burns our once serene domain.
O aching time! O moments big as years!
All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth,
And press it so upon our weary griefs
That unbelief has not a space to breathe.
Saturn, sleep on:--O thoughtless, why did I
Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude?
Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes?
Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep.'

As when, upon a tranced summer-night,
Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust
Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave;
So came these words and went; the while in tears
She touch'd her fair large forehead to the ground,
Just where her fallen hair might be outspread
A soft and silken mat for Saturn's feet.
One moon, with alteration slow, had shed
Her silver seasons four upon the night,
And still these two were postured motionless,
Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern;
The frozen God still couchant on the earth,
And the sad Goddess weeping at his feet:
Until at length old Saturn lifted up
His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone,
And all the gloom and sorrow ofthe place,
And that fair kneeling Goddess; and then spake,
As with a palsied tongue, and while his beard
Shook horrid with such aspen-malady:
'O tender spouse of gold Hyperion,
Thea, I feel thee ere I see thy face;
Look up, and let me see our doom in it;
Look up, and tell me if this feeble shape
Is Saturn's; tell me, if thou hear'st the voice
Of Saturn; tell me, if this wrinkling brow,
Naked and bare of its great diadem,
Peers like the front of Saturn? Who had power
To make me desolate? Whence came the strength?
How was it nurtur'd to such bursting forth,
While Fate seem'd strangled in my nervous grasp?
But it is so; and I am smother'd up,
And buried from all godlike exercise
Of influence benign on planets pale,
Of admonitions to the winds and seas,
Of peaceful sway above man's harvesting,
And all those acts which Deity supreme
Doth ease its heart of love in.--I am gone
Away from my own bosom: I have left
My strong identity, my real self,
Somewhere between the throne, and where I sit
Here on this spot of earth. Search, Thea, search!
Open thine eyes eterne, and sphere them round
Upon all space: space starr'd, and lorn of light;
Space region'd with life-air; and barren void;
Spaces of fire, and all the yawn of hell.--
Search, Thea, search! and tell me, if thou seest
A certain shape or shadow, making way
With wings or chariot fierce to repossess
A heaven he lost erewhile: it must--it must
Be of ripe progress--Saturn must be King.
Yes, there must be a golden victory;
There must be Gods thrown down, and trumpets blown
Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival
Upon the gold clouds metropolitan,
Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir
Of strings in hollow shells; and there shall be
Beautiful things made new, for the surprise
Of the sky-children; I will give command:
Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?'
This passion lifted him upon his feet,
And made his hands to struggle in the air,
His Druid locks to shake and ooze with sweat,
His eyes to fever out, his voice to cease.
He stood, and heard not Thea's sobbing deep;
A little time, and then again he snatch'd
Utterance thus.--'But cannot I create?
Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth
Another world, another universe,
To overbear and crumble this to nought?
Where is another Chaos? Where?'--That word
Found way unto Olympus, and made quake
The rebel three.--Thea was startled up,
And in her bearing was a sort of hope,
As thus she quick-voic'd spake, yet full of awe.

'This cheers our fallen house: come to our friends,
O Saturn! come away, and give them heart;
I know the covert, for thence came I hither.'
Thus brief; then with beseeching eyes she went
With backward footing through the shade a space:
He follow'd, and she turn'd to lead the way
Through aged boughs, that yielded like the mist
Which eagles cleave upmounting from their nest.

Meanwhile in other realms big tears were shed,
More sorrow like to this, and such like woe,
Too huge for mortal tongue or pen of scribe:
The Titans fierce, self-hid, or prison-bound,
Groan'd for the old allegiance once more,
And listen'd in sharp pain for Saturn's voice.
But one of the whole mammoth-brood still kept
His sov'reigny, and rule, and majesy;--
Blazing Hyperion on his orbed fire
Still sat, still snuff'd the incense, teeming up
From man to the sun's God: yet unsecure:
For as among us mortals omens drear
Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he--
Not at dog's howl, or gloom-bird's hated screech,
Or the familiar visiting of one
Upon the first toll of his passing-bell,
Or prophesyings of the midnight lamp;
But horrors, portion'd to a giant nerve,
Oft made Hyperion ache. His palace bright,
Bastion'd with pyramids of glowing gold,
And touch'd with shade of bronzed obelisks,
Glar'd a blood-red through all its thousand courts,
Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;
And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds
Flush'd angerly: while sometimes eagles' wings,
Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,
Darken'd the place; and neighing steeds were heard
Not heard before by Gods or wondering men.
Also, when he would taste the spicy wreaths
Of incense, breath'd aloft from sacred hills,
Instead of sweets, his ample palate took
Savor of poisonous brass and metal sick:
And so, when harbor'd in the sleepy west,
After the full completion of fair day,--
For rest divine upon exalted couch,
And slumber in the arms of melody,
He pac'd away the pleasant hours of ease
With stride colossal, on from hall to hall;
While far within each aisle and deep recess,
His winged minions in close clusters stood,
Amaz'd and full offear; like anxious men
Who on wide plains gather in panting troops,
When earthquakes jar their battlements and towers.
Even now, while Saturn, rous'd from icy trance,
Went step for step with Thea through the woods,
Hyperion, leaving twilight in the rear,
Came slope upon the threshold of the west;
Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope
In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes,
Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet
And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies;
And like a rose in vermeil tint and shape,
In fragrance soft, and coolness to the eye,
That inlet to severe magnificence
Stood full blown, for the God to enter in.

He enter'd, but he enter'd full of wrath;
His flaming robes stream'd out beyond his heels,
And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire,
That scar'd away the meek ethereal Hours
And made their dove-wings tremble. On he flared
From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault,
Through bowers of fragrant and enwreathed light,
And diamond-paved lustrous long arcades,
Until he reach'd the great main cupola;
There standing fierce beneath, he stampt his foot,
And from the basements deep to the high towers
Jarr'd his own golden region; and before
The quavering thunder thereupon had ceas'd,
His voice leapt out, despite of godlike curb,
To this result: 'O dreams of day and night!
O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!
O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!
O lank-eared phantoms of black-weeded pools!
Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why
Is my eternal essence thus distraught
To see and to behold these horrors new?
Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?
Am I to leave this haven of my rest,
This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,
This calm luxuriance of blissful light,
These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,
Of all my lucent empire? It is left
Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.
The blaze, the splendor, and the symmetry,
I cannot see but darkness, death, and darkness.
Even here, into my centre of repose,
The shady visions come to domineer,
Insult, and blind, and stifle up my pomp.--
Fall!--No, by Tellus and her briny robes!
Over the fiery frontier of my realms
I will advance a terrible right arm
Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,
And bid old Saturn take his throne again.'--
He spake, and ceas'd, the while a heavier threat
Held struggle with his throat but came not forth;
For as in theatres of crowded men
Hubbub increases more they call out 'Hush!'
So at Hyperion's words the phantoms pale
Bestirr'd themselves, thrice horrible and cold;
And from the mirror'd level where he stood
A mist arose, as from a scummy marsh.
At this, through all his bulk an agony
Crept gradual, from the feet unto the crown,
Like a lithe serpent vast and muscular
Making slow way, with head and neck convuls'd
From over-strained might. Releas'd, he fled
To the eastern gates, and full six dewy hours
Before the dawn in season due should blush,
He breath'd fierce breath against the sleepy portals,
Clear'd them of heavy vapours, burst them wide
Suddenly on the ocean's chilly streams.
The planet orb of fire, whereon he rode
Each day from east to west the heavens through,
Spun round in sable curtaining of clouds;
Not therefore veiled quite, blindfold, and hid,
But ever and anon the glancing spheres,
Circles, and arcs, and broad-belting colure,
Glow'd through, and wrought upon the muffling dark
Sweet-shaped lightnings from the nadir deep
Up to the zenith,--hieroglyphics old,
Which sages and keen-eyed astrologers
Then living on the earth, with laboring thought
Won from the gaze of many centuries:
Now lost, save what we find on remnants huge
Of stone, or rnarble swart; their import gone,
Their wisdom long since fled.--Two wings this orb
Possess'd for glory, two fair argent wings,
Ever exalted at the God's approach:
And now, from forth the gloom their plumes immense
Rose, one by one, till all outspreaded were;
While still the dazzling globe maintain'd eclipse,
Awaiting for Hyperion's command.
Fain would he have commanded, fain took throne
And bid the day begin, if but for change.
He might not:--No, though a primeval God:
The sacred seasons might not be disturb'd.
Therefore the operations of the dawn
Stay'd in their birth, even as here 'tis told.
Those silver wings expanded sisterly,
Eager to sail their orb; the porches wide
Open'd upon the dusk demesnes of night
And the bright Titan, phrenzied with new woes,
Unus'd to bend, by hard compulsion bent
His spirit to the sorrow of the time;
And all along a dismal rack of clouds,
Upon the boundaries of day and night,
He stretch'd himself in grief and radiance faint.
There as he lay, the Heaven with its stars
Look'd down on him with pity, and the voice
Of Coelus, from the universal space,
Thus whisper'd low and solemn in his ear:
'O brightest of my children dear, earth-born
And sky-engendered, son of mysteries
All unrevealed even to the powers
Which met at thy creating; at whose joys
And palpitations sweet, and pleasures soft,
I, Coelus, wonder, how they came and whence;
And at the fruits thereof what shapes they be,
Distinct, and visible; symbols divine,
Manifestations of that beauteous life
Diffus'd unseen throughout eternal space:
Of these new-form'd art thou, O brightest child!
Of these, thy brethren and the Goddesses!
There is sad feud among ye, and rebellion
Of son against his sire. I saw him fall,
I saw my first-born tumbled from his throne!
To me his arms were spread, to me his voice
Found way from forth the thunders round his head!
Pale wox I, and in vapours hid my face.
Art thou, too, near such doom? vague fear there is:
For I have seen my sons most unlike Gods.
Divine ye were created, and divine
In sad demeanour, solemn, undisturb'd,
Unruffled, like high Gods, ye liv'd and ruled:
Now I behold in you fear, hope, and wrath;
Actions of rage and passion; even as
I see them, on the mortal world beneath,
In men who die.--This is the grief, O son!
Sad sign of ruin, sudden dismay, and fall!
Yet do thou strive; as thou art capable,
As thou canst move about, an evident God;
And canst oppose to each malignant hour
Ethereal presence:--I am but a voice;
My life is but the life of winds and tides,
No more than winds and tides can I avail:--
But thou canst.--Be thou therefore in the van
Of circumstance; yea, seize the arrow's barb
Before the tense string murmur.--To the earth!
For there thou wilt find Saturn, and his woes.
Meantime I will keep watch on thy bright sun,
And of thy seasons be a careful nurse.'--
Ere half this region-whisper had come down,
Hyperion arose, and on the stars
Lifted his curved lids, and kept them wide
Until it ceas'd; and still he kept them wide:
And still they were the same bright, patient stars.
Then with a slow incline of his broad breast,
Like to a diver in the pearly seas,
Forward he stoop'd over the airy shore,
And plung'd all noiseless into the deep night.

poem by John Keats
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The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

THE ARGUMENT

RINTRAH roars and shakes his
fires in the burdenM air,
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

Once meek, and in a perilous path

The just man kept his course along

The Vale of Death.

Roses are planted where thorns grow,

And on the barren heath

Sing the honey bees.

Then the perilous path was planted,
And a river and a spring
On every cliff and tomb;

5

THE MARRIAGE OF

And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth:
Till the villain left the paths of ease
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.

Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility ;

And the just man rages in the wilds
Where Uons roam.

Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in

the burdened air,
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

As a new heaven is begun, and it is
now thirty-three years since its advent,
the Eternal Hell revives. And lo!
Swedenborg is the angel sitting at
the tomb: his writings are the Unen
clothes folded up. Now is the domin-
ion of Edom, and the return of Adam
into Paradise. — See Isaiah xxxiv. and
XXXV. chap.

6

HEAVEN AND HELL

Without contraries is no progres-
sion. Attraction and repulsion, rea-
son and energy, love and hate, are
necessary to human existence.

From these contraries spring what
the religious call Good and Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys reason;
Evil is the active springing from
Energy.

Good is heaven. Evil is hell.

THE MARRIAGE OF

THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL

All Bibles or sacred codes have been
the cause of the following errors : —

1. That man has two real existing
principles, viz., a Body and a Soul.

2. That Energy, called Evil, is alone
from the Body ; and that Reason, called
Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment man in
Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following contraries to
these are true : —

1 . Man has no Body distinct from his
Soul. For that called Body is a por-
tion of Soul discerned by the five senses,
the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

2 . Energy is the only life , and is from
the Body; and Reason is the bound
or outward circumference of Energy.

8

HEAVEN AND HELL

3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

Those who restrain desire, do so
because theirs is weak enough to be
restrained; and the restrainer or
reason usurps its place and governs
the unwilling.

And being restrained, it by degrees
becomes passive, till it is only the
shadow of desire.

The history of this is written in
Paradise Lost, and the Governor or
Reason is called Messiah.

And the original Archangel or pos-
sessor of the command of the heavenly
host is called the Devil, or Satan, and
his children are called Sin and Death.

But in the book of Job, Milton's
Messiah is called Satan.

For this history has been adopted by
both parties.

It indeed appeared to Reason as if

9

THE MARRIAGE OF

desire was cast out, but the Devil's
account is, that the Messiah fell, and
formed a heaven of what he stole from
the abyss.

This is shown in the Gospel, where
he prays to the Father to send the
Comforter or desire that Reason may
have ideas to build on, the Jehovah
of the Bible being no other than he
who dwells in flaming fire. Know
that after Christ's death he became
Jehovah.

But in Milton, the Father is Destiny,
the Son a ratio of the five senses, and
the Holy Ghost vacuum !

Note. — The reason Milton wrote
in fetters when he wrote of Angels
and God, and at Uberty when of
Devils and Hell, is because he was
a true poet, and of the Devil's party
without knowing it.

10

HEAVEN AND HELL

A MEMORABLE FANCY

As I was walking among the fires
of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments
of Genius, which to Angels look like
torment and insanity, I collected some
of their proverbs, thinking that as the
sayings used in a nation mark its
character, so the proverbs of Hell show
the nature of infernal wisdom better
than any description of buildings or
garments.

When I came home, on the abyss
of the five senses, where a flat-sided
steep frowns over the present world, I
saw a mighty Devil folded in black
clouds hovering on the sides of the
rock; with corroding fires he wrote
the following sentence now perceived
by the minds of men, and read by
them on earth : —

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'How do you know but every bird
that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of delight,
closed by your senses five?'

12

HEAVEN AND HELL

PROVERBS OF HELL

In seed-time learn, in harvest teach,
in winter enjoy.

Drive your cart and your plough
over the bones of the dead.

The road of excess leads to the
palace of wisdom.

Prudence is a rich ugly old maid
courted by Incapacity.

He who desires, but acts not, breeds
pestilence.

The cut worm forgives the plough.

Dip him in the river who loves
water.

A fool sees not the same tree that a
wise man sees.

He whose face gives no light shall
never become a star.

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Eternity is in love with the produc-
tions of time.

The busy bee has no time for sor-
row.

The hours of folly are measured by
the clock, but of wisdom no clock can
measure.

All wholesome food is caught with-
out a net or a trap.

Bring out number, weight, and
measure in a year of dearth.

No bird soars too high if he soars
with his own wings.

A dead body revenges not injuries.

The most sublime act is to set an-
other before you.

If the fool would persist in his folly
he would become wise.

Folly is the cloak of knavery.

Shame is Pride's cloak.

14

HEAVEN AND HELL

Prisons are built with stones of law,
brothels with bricks of religion.

The pride of the peacock is the
glory of God.

The lust of the goat is the bounty
of God.

The wrath of the lion is the wisdom
of God.

The nakedness of woman is the
work of God.

Excess of sorrow laughs, excess of
joy weeps.

The roaring of lions, the howling of
wolves, the raging of the stormy sea,
and the destructive sword, are por-
tions of Eternity too great for the eye
of man.

The fox condemns the trap, not
himself.

Joys impregnate, sorrows bring
forth.

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Let man wear the fell of the lion,
woman the fleece of the sheep.

The bird a nest, the spider a web,
man friendship.

The selfish smiling fool and the
sullen frowning fool shall be both
thought wise that they may be a rod.

What is now proved was once only
imagined.

The rat, the mouse, the fox, the
rabbit watch the roots; the Hon, the
tiger, the horse, the elephant watch
the fruits.

The cistern contains, the fountain
overflows.

One thought fills immensity.

Always be ready to speak your
mind, and a base man will avoid you.

Everything possible to be believed
is an image of truth.

The eagle never lost so much time

z6

HEAVEN AND HELL

as when he submitted to learn of the
crow.

The fox provides for himself, but
God provides for the lion.

Think in the morning, act in the
noon, eat in the evening, sleep in the
night.

He who has suffered you to impose
on him knows you.

As the plough follows words, so
God rewards prayers.

The tigers of wrath are wiser than
the horses of instruction.

Expect poison from the standing
water.

You never know what is enough
unless you know what is more than
enough.

Listen to the fool's reproach; it is a
kingly title.

The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air,

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THE MARRIAGE OF

the mouth of water, the beard of
earth.

The weak in courage is strong in
cunning.

The apple tree never asks the beech
how he shall grow, nor the lion the
horse how he shall take his prey.

The thankful receiver bears a plenti-
ful harvest.

If others had not been foolish we
should have been so.

The soul of sweet delight can never
be defiled.

When thou seest an eagle, thou
seest a portion of Genius. Lift up thy
head!

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest
leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest
lays his curse on the fairest joys.

To create a little flower is the labour
of ages.

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HEAVEN AND HELL

Damn braces; bless relaxes.

The best wine is the oldest, the best
water the newest.

Prayers plough not; praises reap
not; joys laugh not; sorrows weep
not.

The head Sublime, the heart Pathos,
the genitals Beauty, the hands and
feet Proportion.

As the air to a bird, or the sea
to a fish, so is contempt to the con-
temptible.

The crow wished everything was
black; the owl that everything was
white.

Exuberance is Beauty.

If the lion was advised by the fox,
he would be cunning.

Improvement makes straight roads,
but the crooked roads without Improve-
ment are roads of Genius.

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THE MARRIAGE OF

Sooner murder an infant in its
cradle than nurse unacted desires.

Where man is not, nature is barren.

Truth can never be told so as to be
understood and not to be believed.

Enough! or Too much.

The ancient poets animated all sen-
sible objects with Gods or Geniuses,
calling them by the names and adorn-
ing them with properties of woods,
rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, na-
tions, and whatever their enlarged
and numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the
Genius of each city and country,
placing it under its mental deity. Till
a system was formed, which some
took advantage of and enslaved the
vulgar by attempting to realize or
abstract the mental deities from their
objects. Thus began Priesthood.

20

HEAVEN AND HELL

Choosing forms of worship from
poetic tales. And at length they pro-
nounced that the Gods had ordered
such things. Thus men forgot that
all deities reside in the human breast.

21

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A MEMORABLE FANCY

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel
dined with me, and I asked them how
they dared so roundly to assert that
God spoke to them, and whether they
did not think at the time that they
would be misunderstood, and so be
the cause of imposition.

Isaiah answered: 'I saw no God,
nor heard any, in a finite organical
perception: but my senses discovered
the infinite in everything; and as I
was then persuaded, and remained
confirmed, that the voice of honest
indignation is the voice of God, I cared
not for consequences, but wrote.'*

Then I asked: 'Does a firm per-
suasion that a thing is so, make it
so?'

He replied: 'All poets believe that

22

HEAVEN AND HELL

it does, and in ages of imagination
this firm persuasion removed moun-
tains; but many are not capable of a
firm persuasion of anything.'

Then Ezekiel said : ' The philosophy
of the East taught the first principles
of human perception; some nations
held one principle for the origin, and
some another. We of Israel taught
that the Poetic Genius (as you now
call it) was the first principle, and all
the others merely derivative, which
was the cause of our despising the
Priests and Philosophers of other
countries, and prophesying that all
Gods would at last be proved to origi-
nate in ours, and to be the tributaries
of the Poetic Genius. It was this that
our great poet King David desired so
fervently, and invokes so pathetically,
saying by this he conquers enemies
and governs kingdoms; and we so
loved our Ggd that we cursed in His

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THE MARRIAGE OF

name all the deities of surrounding
nations, and asserted that they had
rebelled. From these opinions the
vulgar came to think that all nations
would at last be subject to the Jews.

'This,' said he, 'like all firm per-
suasions, is come to pass, for all
nations believe the Jews' code, and
worship the Jews' God; and what
greater subjection can be?'

I heard this with some wonder, and
must confess my own conviction.
After dinner I asked Isaiah to favour
the world with his lost works; he said
none of equal value was lost. Ezekiel
said the same of his.

I also asked Isaiah what made him
go naked and barefoot three years.
He answered: 'The same that made
our friend Diogenes the Grecian.'

I then asked Ezekiel why he ate
dung, and lay so long on his right and

24

HEAVEN AND HELL

left side. He answered: 'The desire
of raising other men into a perception
of the infinite. This the North Ameri-
can tribes practise. And is he honest
who resists his genius or conscience,
only for the sake of present ease or
gratification?'

The ancient tradition that the world
will be consumed in fire at the end of
six thousand years is true, as I have
heard from Hell.

For the cherub with his flaming
sword is hereby commanded to leave
his guard at [the] tree of life, and
when he does, the whole creation will
be consumed and appear infinite and
holy, whereas it now appears finite
and corrupt.

This will come to pass by an im-
provement of sensual enjoyment.

But first the notion that man has

25

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a body distinct from his soul is to be
expunged; this I shall do by printing
in the infernal method by corrosives,
which in Hell are salutary and medici-
nal, melting apparent surfaces away,
and displaying the infinite which was
hid.

If the doors of perception were
cleansed everything would appear to
man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till
he sees all things through narrow
chinks of his cavern.

26

HEAVEN AND HELL

A MEMORABLE FANCY

I was in a printing-house in Hell,
and saw the method in which knowl-
edge is transmitted from generation
to generation.

In the first chamber was a dragon-
man, clearing away the rubbish from
a cave's mouth; within, a number of
dragons were hollowing the cave.

In the second chamber was a viper
folding round the rock and the cave,
and others adorning it with gold, silver,
and precious stones.

In the third chamber was an eagle
with wings and feathers of air; he
caused the inside of the cave to be
infinite; around were numbers of
eagle-like men, who built palaces in
the immense cliffs.

In the fourth chamber were lions

27

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of flaming fire raging around and
melting the metals into living fluids.

In the fifth chamber were unnamed
forms, which cast the metals into the
expanse.

There they were received by men
who occupied the sixth chamber, and
took the forms of books, and were
arranged in libraries.

The Giants who formed this world
into its sensual existence and now
seem to live in it in chains are in
truth the causes of its life and the
sources of all activity, but the chains
are the cunning of weak and tame
minds, which have power to resist
energy, according to the proverb,
'The weak in courage is strong in
cunning.'

Thus one portion of being is the

28

HEAVEN AND HELL

Prolific, the other the Devouring. To
the devourer it seems as if the pro-
ducer was in his chains; but it is not
so, he only takes portions of existence,
and fancies that the whole.

But the Prolific would cease to be
prolific unless the Devourer as a sea
received the excess of his delights.

Some will say, 'Is not God alone
the Prolific?' I answer: 'God only
acts and is in existing beings or
men.'

These two classes of men are always
upon earth, and they should be ene-
mies: whoever tries to reconcile them
seeks to destroy existence.

Religion is an endeavour to recon-
cile the two.

Note. — Jesus Christ did not wish
to unite but to separate them, as in
the parable of sheep and goats; and

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He says : ' I came not to send peace,
but a sword.'

Messiah, or Satan, or Tempter, was
formerly thought to be one of the
antediluvians who are our Energies.

30

HEAVEN AND HELL

A MEMORABLE FANCY

An Angel came to me and said: '0
pitiable foolish young man! hor-
rible, dreadful state! Consider the
hot burning dungeon thou art prepar-
ing for thyself to all Eternity, to which
thou art going in such career.'

I said : ' Perhaps you will be willing
to show me my eternal lot, and we
will contemplate together upon it, and
see whether your lot or mine is most
desirable.'*

So he took me through a stable, and
through a church, and down into the
church vault, at the end of v/hich was
a mill; through the mill we went, and
came to a cave; down the winding
cavern we groped our tedious way,
till a void boundless as a nether sky
appeared beneath us, and we held by

31

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the roots of trees, and hung over this
immensity; but I said: 'If you please,
we will commit ourselves to this void,
and see whether Providence is here
also; if you will not, I will.' But he
answered : ' Do not presume, young
man; but as we here remain, behold
thy lot, which will soon appear when
the darkness passes away.'

So I remained with him sitting in
the twisted root of an oak; he was
suspended in a fungus, which hung
with the head downward into the
deep.

By degrees we beheld the infinite
abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning
city; beneath us at an immense dis-
tance was the sun, black but shining;
round it were fiery tracks on which
revolved vast spiders, crawling after
their prey, which flew, or rather
swum, in the infinite deep, in the most

32

HEAVEN AND HELL

terrific shapes of animals sprung from
corruption; and the air was full of
them, and seemed composed of them.
These are Devils, and are called powers
of the air. I now asked my com-
panion which was my eternal lot.
He said: 'Between the black and
white spiders.''

But now, from between the black
and white spiders, a cloud and fire
burst and rolled through the deep,
blackening all beneath so that the
nether deep grew black as a sea, and
rolled with a terrible noise. Beneath
us was nothing now to be seen but a
black tempest, till looking East be-
tween the clouds and the waves, we
saw a cataract of blood mixed with
fire, and not many stones' throw from
us appeared and sunk again the scaly
fold of a monstrous serpent. At last
to the East, distant about three degrees,
appeared a fiery crest above the waves ;

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THE MARRIAGE OF

slowly it reared like a ridge of golden
rocks, till we discovered two globes
of crimson fire, from which the sea
fled away in clouds of smoke; and
now we saw it was the head of Le-
viathan. His forehead was divided
into streaks of green and purple, like
those on a tiger's forehead; soon we
saw his mouth and red gills hang just
above the raging foam, tinging the
black deeps with beams of blood, ad-
vancing toward us with all the fury
of a spiritual existence.

My friend the Angel climbed up
from his station into the mill. I
remained alone, and then this ap-
pearance was no more; but I found
myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside
a river by moonlight, hearing a harper
who sung to the harp; and his theme
was: 'The man who never alters his
opinion is like standing water, and
breeds reptiles of the mind.'

34

HEAVEN AND HELL

But I arose, and sought for the
mill, and there I found my Angel,
who, surprised, asked me how I
escaped.

I answered: 'All that we saw was
owing to your metaphysics; for when
you ran away, I found myself on a
bank by moonlight, hearing a harper.
But now we have seen my eternal
lot, shall I show you yours?' He
laughed at my proposal; but I by
force suddenly caught him in my
arms, and flew Westerly through the
night, till we were elevated above the
earth's shadow; then I flung myself
with him directly into the body of the
sun; here I clothed myself in white,
and taking in my hand Swedenborg*s
volumes, sunk from the glorious clime,
and passed all the planets till we came
to Saturn. Here I stayed to rest, and
then leaped into the void between
Saturn and the fixed stars.

35

THE MARRIAGE OF

'Here,' said I, 'is your lot; in this
space, if space it may be called.'
Soon we saw the stable and the church,
and I took him to the altar and opened
the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit,
into which I descended, driving the
Angel before me. Soon we saw seven
houses of brick. One we entered. In
it were a number of monkeys, baboons,
and all of that species, chained by the
middle, grinning and snatching at one
another, but withheld by the shortness
of their chains. However, I saw that
they sometimes grew numerous, and
then the weak were caught by the
strong, and with a grinning aspect,
first coupled with and then devoured
by plucking off first one Umb and then
another till the body was left a help-
less trunk; this, after grinning and
kissing it with seeming fondness, they
devoured too. And here and there I
saw one savourily picking the fiesh off

36

HEAVEN AND HELL

his own tail. As the stench terribly
annoyed us both, we went into the
mill; and I in my hand brought the
skeleton of a body, which in the mill
was Aristotle's Analytics.

So the Angel said; 'Thy phantasy
has imposed upon me, and thou ought-
est to be ashamed.'

I answered: 'We impose on one
another, and it is but lost time to con-
verse with you whose works are only
Analytics.'*

'I have always found that Angels
have the vanity to speak of them-
selves as the only wise; this they do
with a confident insolence sprouting
from systematic reasoning.

'Thus Swedenborg boasts that what
he writes is new ; though it is only the
contents or index of already published
books.

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'A man carried a monkey about
for a show, and because he was a Uttle
wiser than the monkey, grew vain,
and conceived himself as much wiser
than seven men. It is so with
Swedenborg; he shows the folly of
churches, and exposes hypocrites, till
he imagines that all are religious, and
himself the single one on earth that
ever broke a net.

'Now hear a plain fact: Sweden-
borg has not written one new truth.
Now hear another: he has written all
the old falsehoods.

'And now hear the reason: he con-
versed with Angels who are all re-
ligious, and conversed not with Devils
who all hate reUgion, for he was
incapable through his conceited no-
tions.

'Thus Swedenborg's writings are
a recapitulation of all superficial

38

HEAVEN AND HELL

opinions, and an analysis of the more
sublime, but no further.

'Have now another plain fact: any
man of mechanical talents may from
the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob
Behmen produce ten thousand volumes
of equal value with Swedenborg's, and
from those of Dante or Shakespeare an
infinite number.

'But when he has done this, let
him not say that he knows better than
his master, for he only holds a candle
in sunshine.'

39

THE MARRIAGE OF

A MEMORABLE FANCY

Once I saw a Devil in a flame of
fire, who arose before an Angel that
sat on a cloud, and the Devil uttered
these words: 'The worship of God is,
honouring His gifts in other men each
according to his genius, and loving
the greatest men best. Those who
envy or calumniate great men hate
God, for there is no other God.'

The Angel hearing this became
almost blue, but mastering himself he
grew yellow, and at last white-pink
and smiling, and then replied: 'Thou
idolater, is not God One? and is not
He visible in Jesus Christ? and has
not Jesus Christ given His sanction to
the law of ten commandments? and
are not all other men fools, sinners,
and nothings?'

40

HEAVEN AND HELL

The Devil answered: 'Bray a fool
in a mortar with wheat, yet shall not
his folly be beaten out of him. If
Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you
ought to love Him in the greatest
degree. Now hear how He has given
His sanction to the law of ten com-
mandments. Did He not mock at the
Sabbath, and so mock the Sabbath's
God? murder those who were mur-
dered because of Him? turn away the
law from the woman taken in adultery,
steal the labour of others to support
Him? bear false witness when He
omitted making a defence before
Pilate? covet when He prayed for His
disciples, and when He bid them
shake off the dust of their feet against
such as refused to lodge them? I tell
you, no virtue can exist without break-
ing these ten commandments. Jesus
was all virtue, and acted from im-
pulse, not from rules.'

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When he had so spoken, I beheld
the Angel, who stretched out his arms
embracing the flame of fire, and he
was consumed, and arose as Elijah.

Note. — This Angel, who is now
become a Devil, is my particular
friend; we often read the Bible to-
gether in its infernal or diabolical
sense, which the world shall have if
they behave well.

I have also the Bible of Hell, which
the world shall have whether they
will or no.

One law for the lion and ox is Op-
pression.

42

HEAVEN AND HELL

A SONG OF LIBERTY

1. The Eternal Female groan'd; it
was heard over all the earth:

2. Albion's coast is sick silent; the
American meadows faint.

3. Shadows of prophecy shiver
along by the lakes and the rivers, and
mutter across the ocean. France,
rend down thy dungeon!

4. Golden Spain, burst the barriers
of old Rome !

5. Cast thy keys, Rome, into
the deep — down falling, even to
eternity down falling;

6. And weep!

7. In her trembling hands she took
the new-born terror, howling.

8. On those infinite mountains
of light now barr'd out by the Atlantic

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THE MARRIAGE OF

sea, the new-born fire stood before the
starry king.

9. Flagg'd with grey-browM snows
and thunderous visages, the jealous
wings wavM over the deep.

10. The speary hand burn'd aloft;
unbuckled was the shield; forth went
the hand of jealousy among the flam-
ing hair, and hurl'd the new-born
wonder through the starry night.

11. The fire, the fire is falling !

12. Look up! look up! citizen
of London, enlarge thy countenance!
O Jew, leave counting gold; return to
thy oil and wine! African, black
African! (Go, winged thought, widen
his forehead.)

13. The fiery limbs, the flaming hair
shot like the sinking sun into the
Western sea.

14. WakM from his eternal sleep,
the hoary element roaring fled away.

44

HEAVEN AND HELL

15. Down rush'd, beating his wings
in vain, the jealous king, his grey-
brow'd councillors, thunderous war-
riors, curl'd veterans, among helms
and shields, and chariots, horses, ele-
phants, banners, castles, slings, and
rocks.

16. Falling, rushing, ruining;
buried in the ruins, on Urthona's
dens.

17. All night beneath the ruins;
then their sullen flames, faded, emerge
round the gloomy king.

18. With thunder and fire, leading
his starry hosts through the waste
wilderness, he promulgates his ten
commandments, glancing his beamy
eyelids over the deep in dark dismay.

19. Where the Son of Fire in his
Eastern cloud, while the Morning
plumes her golden breast,

20. Spuming the clouds written

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with curses, stamps the stony law to
dust, loosing the eternal horses from
the dens of night, crying: 'Empire is
no more! and now the lion and wolf
shall cease.'

46

HEAVEN AND HELL

CHORUS

Let the Priests of the Raven of
Dawn, no longer in deadly black, with
hoarse note curse the Sons of Joy.
Nor his accepted brethren whom,
tyrant, he calls free, lay the bound or
build the roof. Nor pale religious
lechery call that virginity that wishes,
but acts not !

For everything that lives is holy.

47

poem by William Blake
Added by Poetry Lover
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Alastor: or, the Spirit of Solitude

Earth, Ocean, Air, belovèd brotherhood!
If our great Mother has imbued my soul
With aught of natural piety to feel
Your love, and recompense the boon with mine;
If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even,
With sunset and its gorgeous ministers,
And solemn midnight's tingling silentness;
If Autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood,
And Winter robing with pure snow and crowns
Of starry ice the gray grass and bare boughs;
If Spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes
Her first sweet kisses,--have been dear to me;
If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast
I consciously have injured, but still loved
And cherished these my kindred; then forgive
This boast, belovèd brethren, and withdraw
No portion of your wonted favor now!

Mother of this unfathomable world!
Favor my solemn song, for I have loved
Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps record of the trophies won from thee,
Hoping to still these obstinate questionings
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,
Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,
When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,
Like an inspired and desperate alchemist
Staking his very life on some dark hope,
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks
With my most innocent love, until strange tears,
Uniting with those breathless kisses, made
Such magic as compels the charmèd night
To render up thy charge; and, though ne'er yet
Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary,
Enough from incommunicable dream,
And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought,
Has shone within me, that serenely now
And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre
Suspended in the solitary dome
Of some mysterious and deserted fane,
I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain
May modulate with murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.

There was a Poet whose untimely tomb
No human hands with pious reverence reared,
But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds
Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid
Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness:
A lovely youth,--no mourning maiden decked
With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath,
The lone couch of his everlasting sleep:
Gentle, and brave, and generous,--no lorn bard
Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh:
He lived, he died, he sung in solitude.
Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes,
And virgins, as unknown he passed, have pined
And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes.
The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn,
And Silence, too enamoured of that voice,
Locks its mute music in her rugged cell.

By solemn vision and bright silver dream
His infancy was nurtured. Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient air
Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.
The fountains of divine philosophy
Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great,
Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past
In truth or fable consecrates, he felt
And knew. When early youth had passed, he left
His cold fireside and alienated home
To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.
Many a wide waste and tangled wilderness
Has lured his fearless steps; and he has bought
With his sweet voice and eyes, from savage men,
His rest and food. Nature's most secret steps
He like her shadow has pursued, where'er
The red volcano overcanopies
Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice
With burning smoke, or where bitumen lakes
On black bare pointed islets ever beat
With sluggish surge, or where the secret caves,
Rugged and dark, winding among the springs
Of fire and poison, inaccessible
To avarice or pride, their starry domes
Of diamond and of gold expand above
Numberless and immeasurable halls,
Frequent with crystal column, and clear shrines
Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite.
Nor had that scene of ampler majesty
Than gems or gold, the varying roof of heaven
And the green earth, lost in his heart its claims
To love and wonder; he would linger long
In lonesome vales, making the wild his home,
Until the doves and squirrels would partake
From his innocuous band his bloodless food,
Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks,
And the wild antelope, that starts whene'er
The dry leaf rustles in the brake, suspend
Her timid steps, to gaze upon a form
More graceful than her own.

His wandering step,
Obedient to high thoughts, has visited
The awful ruins of the days of old:
Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste
Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers
Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids,
Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe'er of strange,
Sculptured on alabaster obelisk
Or jasper tomb or mutilated sphinx,
Dark Æthiopia in her desert hills
Conceals. Among the ruined temples there,
Stupendous columns, and wild images
Of more than man, where marble daemons watch
The Zodiac's brazen mystery, and dead men
Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around,
He lingered, poring on memorials
Of the world's youth: through the long burning day
Gazed on those speechless shapes; nor, when the moon
Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades
Suspended he that task, but ever gazed
And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind
Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw
The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.

Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food,
Her daily portion, from her father's tent,
And spread her matting for his couch, and stole
From duties and repose to tend his steps,
Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe
To speak her love, and watched his nightly sleep,
Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips
Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath
Of innocent dreams arose; then, when red morn
Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home
Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned.

The Poet, wandering on, through Arabie,
And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,
And o'er the aërial mountains which pour down
Indus and Oxus from their icy caves,
In joy and exultation held his way;
Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within
Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine
Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower,
Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched
His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep
There came, a dream of hopes that never yet
Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veilèd maid
Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.
Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought; its music long,
Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held
His inmost sense suspended in its web
Of many-colored woof and shifting hues.
Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,
And lofty hopes of divine liberty,
Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy,
Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood
Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame
A permeating fire; wild numbers then
She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs
Subdued by its own pathos; her fair hands
Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp
Strange symphony, and in their branching veins
The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale.
The beating of her heart was heard to fill
The pauses of her music, and her breath
Tumultuously accorded with those fits
Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose,
As if her heart impatiently endured
Its bursting burden; at the sound he turned,
And saw by the warm light of their own life
Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil
Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare,
Her dark locks floating in the breath of night,
Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips
Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly.
His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess
Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs, and quelled
His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet
Her panting bosom:--she drew back awhile,
Then, yielding to the irresistible joy,
With frantic gesture and short breathless cry
Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.
Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night
Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep,
Like a dark flood suspended in its course,
Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.

Roused by the shock, he started from his trance--
The cold white light of morning, the blue moon
Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,
The distinct valley and the vacant woods,
Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled
The hues of heaven that canopied his bower
Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep,
The mystery and the majesty of Earth,
The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes
Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly
As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven.
The spirit of sweet human love has sent
A vision to the sleep of him who spurned
Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues
Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade;
He overleaps the bounds. Alas! alas!
Were limbs and breath and being intertwined
Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, forever lost
In the wide pathless desert of dim sleep,
That beautiful shape! Does the dark gate of death
Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,
O Sleep? Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds
And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake
Lead only to a black and watery depth,
While death's blue vault with loathliest vapors hung,
Where every shade which the foul grave exhales
Hides its dead eye from the detested day,
Conducts, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms?
This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart;
The insatiate hope which it awakened stung
His brain even like despair.

While daylight held
The sky, the Poet kept mute conference
With his still soul. At night the passion came,
Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream,
And shook him from his rest, and led him forth
Into the darkness. As an eagle, grasped
In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast
Burn with the poison, and precipitates
Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud,
Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight
O'er the wide aëry wilderness: thus driven
By the bright shadow of that lovely dream,
Beneath the cold glare of the desolate night,
Through tangled swamps and deep precipitous dells,
Startling with careless step the moon-light snake,
He fled. Red morning dawned upon his flight,
Shedding the mockery of its vital hues
Upon his cheek of death. He wandered on
Till vast Aornos seen from Petra's steep
Hung o'er the low horizon like a cloud;
Through Balk, and where the desolated tombs
Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind
Their wasting dust, wildly he wandered on,
Day after day, a weary waste of hours,
Bearing within his life the brooding care
That ever fed on its decaying flame.
And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair,
Sered by the autumn of strange suffering,
Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand
Hung like dead bone within its withered skin;
Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone,
As in a furnace burning secretly,
From his dark eyes alone. The cottagers,
Who ministered with human charity
His human wants, beheld with wondering awe
Their fleeting visitant. The mountaineer,
Encountering on some dizzy precipice
That spectral form, deemed that the Spirit of Wind,
With lightning eyes, and eager breath, and feet
Disturbing not the drifted snow, had paused
In its career; the infant would conceal
His troubled visage in his mother's robe
In terror at the glare of those wild eyes,
To remember their strange light in many a dream
Of after times; but youthful maidens, taught
By nature, would interpret half the woe
That wasted him, would call him with false names
Brother and friend, would press his pallid hand
At parting, and watch, dim through tears, the path
Of his departure from their father's door.

At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
He paused, a wide and melancholy waste
Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged
His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there,
Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds.
It rose as he approached, and, with strong wings
Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course
High over the immeasurable main.
His eyes pursued its flight:--'Thou hast a home,
Beautiful bird! thou voyagest to thine home,
Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck
With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes
Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy.
And what am I that I should linger here,
With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes,
Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned
To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers
In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven
That echoes not my thoughts?' A gloomy smile
Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips.
For sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly
Its precious charge, and silent death exposed,
Faithless perhaps as sleep, a shadowy lure,
With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms.

Startled by his own thoughts, he looked around.
There was no fair fiend near him, not a sight
Or sound of awe but in his own deep mind.
A little shallop floating near the shore
Caught the impatient wandering of his gaze.
It had been long abandoned, for its sides
Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints
Swayed with the undulations of the tide.
A restless impulse urged him to embark
And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste;
For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves
The slimy caverns of the populous deep.