Come.

Stop a moment with me. Far from noise,

and every screen, and every City… Pause.

Be like the oak or like an acolyte

of Dawn—when dawns were gods, and there was silence

and it was holy. Come. Lay down your thoughts.

There is a thing that I would say to you

tonight (and I would have you listening)…

canto i: overture: a eulogy

It is a great endeavor, all in all,

and probably past my competence to bear,

but though I’d call to Heaven for its help

no Heavens hear (their end is mine to tell

and mine alone). …We should have requiem, no?

Music? (despite ‘the Muses’ fell) Well, though

for inspiration there’s no ‘Spirit’ now,

I’ll sing—I’ll conjure spirit, out of songs

or sod. Reanimate! I’ll threnody

for Deity.

I’ll sing the death of God.

I’ll sing, to numbered forests one more time

this final melody. Here, at the end

of a sick world—in spots of moon some arms

of yews let enter—here, I’ll end my music,

and stop my strings, and mute forever songs

and poems which once made hymns in Heaven. You,

butchered Significance—a deeper Meaning—

You’re deaf to songs at last. But from the skies

that overcast Your resting place, I’ll stop

and vigil, gaze below into Your hell,

and here devote this final symphony

to eulogize Your shade.

I played the harp once.

I used to sing. Chorus and choir—the whole…

damn…thing. I sang, and, singing…

Nevermind.

For some, that deep assurance of The Light,

that charge of purpose, through the spiritual—

for some of us, that homey camp’s not camp—

it’s

home itself since boyhood.

Once, in clothes

of simple white, above (what should I call them?

The ‘Crystal Spheres’? The ‘rows’ in God’s Bouquet?)

Well, let’s just say, in presence of the One

(where - Pure - presided), I would stand and sing…

lifting my pretty prayers up in their turn,

extoling Sacred… Careless youth swept on,

(in time made soft by safety in His arms)

as I, by churching Seraphim, would come

before the Throne of God and burn with praise

ablaze in burning vistas of the Dawn…

up-fascinated—looking on Our Lord,

until

it burned.

Transcendence: overrun.

And all the propping of a Purpose, lost.

(So go our innocences

—and our Gods.)

The rest is as you’d guess it: Disenchanted

spend steel machineguns on the overworld

and scorch the Kingdom—slaying Seraphim,

the Rose of Angels—as they burst the bubble

E M P Y R E A N, and killed the El Shaddai…

That’s done. Over. Finished. The point is this:

that I, a turncoat to their cause, remained…

I linger still. When Heaven fell, I stayed

(from son of God: reluctant atheist)

and live now in the City of its ash.

Well… had.

Tonight, I fled. Tonight, I’ve left for…

—I know eventually I must go back!

but… That’s for later. Now, there’s night… warm air…

Tonight, I’ll make a marking of His end,

the Heavens’ siege: observed this late July,

2010 (Non Annus Domini).

For there is no escaping what we’ve made…:

The corporate Beast. Sleazed Salesmen’s propaganda.

And smiling Screens of smiling shit—to fill! ®

Hell,

disillusioned with revolt, I’ve come

a mourner to God’s graveside, and—with hymns,

with eulogy—intend a wake, to watch

and grieve the carcass of Sublimity.

For through this Void we’ve opened up to dig it,

I look. I see Him. There — God’s ghost:

now lost

in all the twilight of an underworld…

. . . .

. . . . .

Downward

within a half-lit, windless wood

in eerie forests of the dead abyss

down

where the willow-sprays (in emerald mist)

bleed leaves into a thick collage of ash

and evergreen, and choke the dimming gloam

there sits God’s shadow

(all alone).

And there,

atop a rock of moss and boulder stone,

He broods. Hunched over…crumpling down His back

to cup a billowed beard in his old hand,

the Lord, LORD God, who looks toward meadowlands

that lie beyond his clearing

slowly breathes…

In dangled dreads, gray rivulets of locks

in spiraled double-helices descend

from His drooped temples—seeming, as they do,

perhaps the way the smoke from offered ewes

had rippled off the altar-tops that’d crowned

Jerusalem’s acropolis (though, those

curled to Heaven—these: shear down); or as

the rain, storm-gray, which children’d say He weeps

from cloudy shadows (well, He weeps them now).

For in the posture of a once-great-king,

whose head, drink-heavy with the Mysteries

of Justice, would on palm rest meditating

before some edict(Bliss or Fire, say)’s given—

so, holding for an Ark of Cherubim

this boulder as a throne to wonder on,

Jehovah ponders,

quietly,

His Fall…

Night wraps Him round… or, such a seeming-night:

a dullish-darkness of the skies brought on

by what the moon can do in intercept

to null the sun. It is a quiet dungeon

(fittingly vast for such a Prisoner

of clout), and lusher still (by far) than what

death’s blight and barren tropes expect to sprout

among the barred and buried. There He lies…

Yet

to a clearing now, beyond those woods

(where He now looks, and takes in all His hell),

there, through the thicket’s thinning, old God gleans

some far expanse of underworld not yet

divined by Him (still freshly fallen), flecked

by distant glimmerings.

He leans His head…

There, objects

(distant)

(indiscernible)

glow with a muted quavering of brilliance.

But, from His distance, blur is all He sees—

…until (at last), no longer wavering,

the humbled Deity slides off His rock

and breaks the knots of brush to thread the trees…

Slivers of silver light slit sight through limbs

in bands and bars. The forest’s dark within…

Then—coming loose from the laired leaves and ferns

to gaze, at last, upon the wilted plains

—He

understands.

A flash, or panging, sweeps

God’s gazing understanding like a gasp.

He’s fixed.

There, on the windswept heath, as far

as dull light from the moon-sun can reveal:

ruins of Heaven sprawled horizonward—

studs in the wasted hills of sacred scrap

like a blue desert, littered white with skulls:

Eternity spread to eternity…

God stands and stares.

God stands, and He breathes deep.

Then

like a father past the family plot,

the once-high King of these fragmented blocks

meanders through the rubble of His reign

in shapes of resignation…

Is this it?

The place that good ol’ Heaven will not stir from

after it too fell blazing from the sky?

The puddled sieges of God’s city’s storm,

now pooled in ruin, resting… (Quando cœli

movendi sunt: Intention’s last remove.)

Here lie those Crystal Spheres

in shards. And all

the Primum Mobile

a broken clock.

Here the mechanics of Ideality

dissolve as ring on ring of singing stars

(once thought to grace the upper air) have fallen,

crashing to dirt and splintering to arc

on arc

on arc

like an exploded chain

of wreathing circles.

Everything is down.

The snug geometries of purposed cosmos: snapped!

The quintessential pillars that had borne

a seeing sky: disintegrate, spread out

in pieces on this valley.

In-between

goes God, who, at a pace –“adagio”—

now walks these broken passageways and halls:

some shadowed Spirit from a shattered world.

…Who knew the LORD was mortal? that the skies

could fall? before our revolution (mad

till then) revealed all notions and beliefs

for what they are, and struck the fatal blow

into the reeling Absolutes of humans?

Was there no Heaven—but for thinking so…?

Well, wandering this labyrinth of debris

(His hand occasionally alighting soft

on tumbled blocks of ruined numinous),

the quietly perusing Lord has stopped.

He views a stone.

This broken slab depicts…

Almighty’s battle with Leviathan…

(whose myth from ancient psalms turned pious minds

to awe, and eyes to Heaven: God was king,

and strong…) So on this moonlit ruin’s shard—

which shows the chaos that the beast began,

and glows a picture of the war it waged

and all its devastation of the world—

there bold Jehovah stands victorious

above the thing! and, in His mighty Hand,

holds dangling lines that, at their bottom, hook

the Serpent by a septum ring—its proud

rebellion and voracious mutiny

subdued by chains, and bound

by wiser Kingship…

Except

their captive Victor’s torn His gaze

from faith’s archaic chronicles. With head

bent low, a trembling arm propped up against

the hieroglyphs, God’s eyes refuse to trace

one measure more, and fall—like Him—to where

dark ground is shaded by His darker shadow.

He leans into His history. The cold

memorial supports His weight and stands

a sturdy foil to his old flickering frame—

while now His other hand’s become a veil

to shroud His eyes, and shroud His face…

until

some rising murmur enters in…

God lifts

His head. A solemn singing gains (though, soft

and faded like the whispers of the wind)

over some grassy ridge. He walks towards it…

Then, on its scope of ledge, he looks

and eyes

what, down below Him, sighs its sea of singing:

For mile on mile of meadow: sullen feathers—

wounded flocks of His Angels comb the fields

for arms and armor lost amid the Fall.

And as they stoop, and search for what they lost—

like children raking through the rubble-mound

that was a home (before the cyclone struck),

to find some treasured toy, their threadbare doll

(so they can hug a friend amidst the loss?)—

they sing “in paradisum deducant”

and walk the grass.

Jehovah stands and stares

upon the hummock in the withered sedge,

as symphonies of wandering seraphs lull

these somber hills with Requiem.

Its sound

is all along the meadowscape, and soft

as ever, wafting upward-caught in breeze

like mermaid song in ocean sprays. But, where

is He?

Already gone, it seems… Perhaps

to seek himself a hiding place? a cave?

Some dismal darkness dark enough to lose

the Living God

when Gods no longer live.

Well, haunting Holy Ghost: rest.

R. I. P.

. . . . .

. . . .

Out of our depths I draw these images:

obscure and murky through such distance (dim,

and deep), which weathers all the underworld

like faded notes on vellum sheets: squint-seen—

yet clear enough for plucking from the page

to strum an elegy for Spirit…

Spirit…

Hadn’t we loved it? once…? —Not without cause

(though crucial were those faults that caused His end

and proved His cross). Still, such a thing as “spirit,”

which gave us our ideal for centuries,

surely deserves some hymn, encomium,

to mark its passing? Mark, if just an hour,

God’s unmarked grave with… what? Orations? Well,

if He’s to sleep forever, I will spread

some flowers of regard upon this place:

a basic honor not performed for Him

but all the Sacred.

I helped slay it too.

Should we repent? For, woken of our dream

“Religion,” now a nightmare incubus—

that curse upon our planet and ourselves—

now this consuming, all-consuming Thing

molests our modern sleep, and violates

the only precious. You know what I mean!

The dollar-humping drudgery. The sickness

of these late days. Demon ‘Development.’

And the quick cash men make to fat themselves,

possessed by avarice; by glutless lust

to rape the Earth and desecrate it Product,©

men drooling for armageddon—for a world

self-ending, self-destructing—Mall on Mall

and Salesmen hawking lie on lie from Screens

that wrap a Beast of glass beset—and yet

…what else can be?

Cheap surface-peddlers rule—

and stupor, waste, commodity remain

our dear idolatries.

To them I must,

since brooding on the graves of Gods is vain

and I am done with singing—

But

once more,

before conceding peace and quiet here—

(self-exiled to a forest’s loneliness

away from our psychotic, shallow blaze

in wealth’s Metropolis)—once more

I’ll sing

and play the solemn dirge Your wake is wanting.

Then may You rest. With God, I’ll bury songs,

whose final utterance can melody

the death of Him

and all that we’ve become…

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