Lillith


A wind when you’re wandering
piercing through your cotton coat
under the white crescent listening
to the sound of gears not revolving.

That owl that trails
the rustling of trees,
Lillith, better known as the first banished of Eden
(though we’re all exiles from there),
the one who pursues
those who outwalk the furthest city light.

The alleyways you only notice with the moon,
her course leads to the shades
and all who follow the serpent
become part of the million eyed creature
known as the night.


Heaven’s Gate


I laughed at the citrus juice suicides,
that mixture of adolescence
and half-blue barbiturates.
Minds only work in tragedy and comedy
(like the smiling/frowning masks)
and I didn’t want that ending
where you suddenly feel the weight of your skull case.

Their website is still alive,
abandoned like an old home
whose dull paint is still wearing thin.
That house that made you scared of ghosts
even though you’ve never believed in them.

Applewhite (how odd to have both
the most symbolic color
and the most metaphorical fruit in the same name)
told us they were escaping,
the comet’s way, all ice with a luminous finish.

They left with their toxic lungs and purple velvet
coverings over their faces.  An escape
from the presence of clay.
That absent site reads like a shadow’s message
receding from a tree.
I can only guess their motives
for going to such a quiet place to scream.


Swedenborg’s Demons


Swedenborg, like a hermit
lifting a reborn lantern,
slept in his British apartment,
and dreamed of demons-
he meant humans, but that name doesn’t fit
anyone who choose hell over heaven.

The revolving goal of humanity
to be on the stutter clouds where a distant sun
radiates forever down
still and constant the tungsten glow
the spin light follow of the disc,
the heliocentric aspiration.

But within the inferno they remember why
they prefer the dark caves,
(recall that “Lucifer” originally meant “light bringer”)
to see the life that comes from the fire
staring like the tiger’s eye,
the crimson and obsidian like the origin of contrast,
Heraclitus said that flames were the first element,
but before that there was shade.


Javelins/Electrons


Zeus’ sculptures fragmentized
with a thousand year’s wind and rain and sun
carving potholes and jagged cracks
into his arms, all the marble pieces
which are now all pebbles resting
on the ground.
I heard him once-

Below the clouds
rolled that Olympian laugh,
from that somewhere that is nowhere
the roar of thunder after the flash.

The bolt that splinters fall touches both
the dirt and the stars,
eats out the gloom of night,
and make the earth tremble.

Lightning (they tell me) is the result
of an electron flow,
those orbiting circles invisible to the eye.
I remember about atoms the same revelation
from every science teacher,
they are more empty than you think.


Masks


The dragon, like the vampire and the fairy fire,
is a story which strays across all cultures.
It’s the representative animal of Yang,
being lifted off the cold ground and becoming part of heaven.
It’s the third and final enemy of Beowulf,
and they managed to slay each other,
maintaining the stilt balance of monsters and men.
In Revelations its identity is mixed
with three others who we only know from myth:
the serpent, the devil, and Satan.
It is the alchemist’s favored creature
when it devours its own tail,
which makes it begin and end at the same point.
The truth in stories about illusions
is not that we fear the dragons,
but the gaping sea
of nothing that it comes from.
We spread phantoms because we need
masks to cover the void.


Reflections


Doppelgangers:
doubles that live within the mirrors
are stilled by the camera’s flash
and hang onto the surface of the rivers.
Ourselves/our shadows we never know.

“Know thyself”
is inscribed on Delphi’s west wall.
They didn’t mean to find your reflection though,
but as a “memento mori”
(“know that you are mortal”:
originally spoken to Roman emperors
who had all the earth’s corners).

The Gnostics claimed
the motto as their own,
and (like the stories of the Garden)
added their own interpretation.
They said the universe began with a mirror,
when God glanced in he forgot that he was
both the glass and the reflection
and though what he saw was a man.


The Cosmic Cloak of Night


They used to say the night
was a velvet cape
that formed waves and covered
the day.

They used to say the stars
were cold pinholes
against that ceiling.
Tiny fabric tears
that gave us a glance past
the vast cloaking dark.

The things they used to say
make me wonder,
what could be the source of
the shining behind
that black ink binding?