willows, elms, ginkos, gooseberries, leeks, pipsissewa,
unripe apples on the tree, ripe pistachios peeking out of their shells,
rotten mussels not peeking out of theirs, absinthe, beer
in a Québec pub on St-Patrick’s Day,
these have their place in the scheme of green.
But Not Green Glare On Snow
on pristine white unlit or moonlit or shepherd-lit or hireling-lit
black-light-lit snow!
Snow is white.
Chameleonesque blue or mauve, or grey, or gold maybe. Not green.
Under it is green. Over green is white.
Let’s get this right.
People who live
People who live in glass houses
sunbathe.
Once the seal on the day’s package slit,
sun pops, light squirts, ultraviolet leaks, and the skin
begins its melanomic countdown.
Our days are numbered in suns and spots. It’s skin and sun
all the way, till death us do part.
This light we die of
it offers us a dying into more light.
Is that the Way and the Truth?
I am the Way, the Truth and by the way the Death?
We’re reluctant to condone suicide, hang on! we say,
lâche pas! Yet we lie in the sun.
I fall asleep in a cloud of unknowing, the sun bright on the bed
through a dozen glass panes
basking in the Presence…
the Bridegroom in the midst of his swift course
riding his chariot up the skies, loving his creation.
This is the contemplative fix, voyons!
to bask in the Son is the very model of contemplative prayer.
And gradually
the sun changes your skin, your borderland and doucement
we are divinized ‘until our singeing day’ when
what else? we fall asleep in the Sun.
The raised eyebrow
So the moment :
you
like any Cro-Magnon throwing his
femur into the air in 2001: A Space Odyssey
as the brass chords of ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’
ta-da-dah!... upwards and
up comes the citation, the golden eyebrow :
‘And I quote’.
That raised eyebrow questions the horizon.
There it is : the moment you wait for, hope for, cheer for.
The eye is nothing compared to the eyebrow.
You’ll see, it will get smaller and smaller
that eye up there in the blue yonder
eyebrows singed to nothing.
But the citation begins, here
at the horizon, eyebrow on its face.
(Well, where else would you expect an eyebrow?
Except perhaps you’d expect
the citation mark to be standing
like a sentence, a pronouncement.
Well, but the sun, the horizon, the earth.
You are prone too, to watch.)
It says of the day, the earth, ‘And I quote’.
And what follows is of course
the citation, the day, the earth,
the living of it.
At the other side of earth
in the course of things comes ‘End of quote’.
A golden fauve-red eyebrow
sinks from sight. But that’s beyond our reaches.
We’re a sunrise people.
Here we only start to speak.
And that’s the story
of when sight is cited.
Transfiguration
‘Lord, it is good for us to be here.’ Peter
not such an ass with that, you know.
Many a true word spoken in mist… the Cloud
coming on, the unknowing.
The building of houses, that’s
what’s on trial.
The fleuve is blue as Welsh slate this morning,
as labradorite,
ram between two rods of ice, the maple sap suspended mid-run
a Sanko Line freighter
green as a glacier
sliding down to sea.
To build or not to build, before the transfiguring lightrise
coram Deo in a house, new every morning and only ever once.
We are a building species, we’re Doozers. We do.
Sometimes the right building doesn’t happen.
But
