COMMENTARY ON JOEL

COMMENTARY ON JOEL

G.C. Waldrep

And then their gifts looked up, in the shadow of the stranger. I beggared myself at the treasuries of wind. The figs drew in their faces, they pawed the ground. Pears, plucked, stewed in their stone cells. I gathered them from the asphalt’s heavy apron, first at the edge of the mountain, then deep in a midwestern plain. They wore brutal voices in their thighs. We moved further into the orchard, its radiant sleep upon the tilth’s luminous anvil. Radio waves in the galvanized sheds, arrows stored in some persecuted heat. Summon the oaths from their velvet warrens—friend, you recognize this turbid amplitude, abundance’s nodal chain. It was dark inside the body, and the body’s body. The children bareheaded stumbling in single file towards the gap, their tongues like crowns to which the constellations kneel. I did not call to them, speak to them. The war was almost over—we measured dry proofs against our own organs, laid out for just this purpose on exhaustion’s tepid sheen. Acres and acres of prison lighting absorbing the night, contracting the web of low roads by which the dead are loved. I felt the creek’s clean breath against the comet’s shoulder, yeast in my eyes, yeast in my ears, in the pits of my beard. Speak, father, Master, rhythmic bread all time plows under. In my dream dark swallows with blazing teeth chewed right through the letter I’d received. We buried the church in our sojourn; each sculpted his neighbor from wax, disgust, and tears. I had six brothers or I had none, picking my way carefully through the scarlet ranks. I believed in pollen, bones, the twilight valence of the fugue and its dispossessors. We were far away from any village and thirsty, the kingdom shrunk to a single gate, a half-drunk well, one grain lodged in the heart’s torn cloak. And their gifts looked up, the song went. The fruit close to my mouth, enough darkness to garrison any outside world. Little lame empty creatures, imagine another, bolder Christ: go earthless, let speech lay its ancient edge.

          1:1

A hymn veins the forest; the hand wears the body like a living suit. The body’s milk spoke as a single voice, a beautiful moon the blood dreams. To wake (the burning animals of the body, the mercy machines). Mercy’s small blue coal disperses. A shadow-embassy, a sleeping lamp—spoken-to, day’s scab, gently burning.

          1:2

Hear this, old men (for I am old now, I have dispersed both my javelin and my crown): The steps of fire, leading to the ring of fire. Mercy’s long, unwritten vowel even the forest stretches its green candle towards.

          1:3

My face slept. The path of lust, its lipless dualism. Write in the scar’s clear margin, pariah: probe silence’s feast.

          1:4

And thus looked back, the breast neither blame nor garment, a perfect salt. Now in the body-dark winter’s decibel hones its bone-knife.>

“If a soul were seen as being subject to fire” was my misreading (of St. Cyril of Alexandria), also “dire and intolerable damage,” “insatiable teeth.” Captivities, antigens. Towards God, a single language breaks (the bleak touch of the dead). —Meanwhile we name the animals.

This is what the strangers were singing: Inside its blue house, day came burning.

          1:5

Neither history nor memory, our bodies reckon blood’s many soul-names, its tine-debt,its perfect blindness. My heart’s winter-palace, snug brother-skin. Wachet auf, the nation’s touch, its emerald question tumbling in the eddy.

          1:6

Day-sickle’s tooth season, a white feast. The key of wine, “strong and beyond counting” (see: Green grow the rushes, O). Something blind beneath music’s porcelain law. Considered saints, the living—like peace, grief’s anthem set among stones.

          1:7

Beneath mercy, something small and perfect, a flesh or dust. Speak, moon, my brother-within-faith. Children stroked the night’s last honey, within winter’s sweet glands. 

And yet within war’s bloody Baedeker, grief is always winter’s glass. 

Strip the fig tree drawn from the black well of war. Mercy’s mind, cold at the edge of Christ.

          1:8

“The vintage songs” (Cyril again). Can you teach them to me, can anyone teach them, sorrow’s flushed regime, its bloody tithe. Bride-eye, bride-caught. Sweet noon, the last wars burr this temple’s silence, the discarded husks of constellations.

          1:9

Thus, the abolition of sacrifices. View nothing, and the night, thus worshiped, wakes you like a bell. Bread traces its parallax around the image, its blown altars. 

Enthrone the stones of mourning, which do not know our names. (Once again, we teach them, or try to. Watch us trying to teach the stones our pretty names.)

          1:10

In my dream the ovens for the baking of bread were built as mazes. Inside them, birth after birth.... The eye’s scent, discrete, independent of the body.

          1:11

The eyes, steeped in language, asked for a perfect church, were offered the body (again) (of course). The very texture of the skin changes as one approaches (nipples, lips). Meat-house, meat-mansion: a good year among those robust silences.

          1:12

It’s midnight: Let’s name again, let’s sing the marking song. All together, now? Don’t mind the translations— 

The heart’s bathed limb, annealed by the clay gate. The pilot’s breath, taken deep through a clear flame, become its own dark fleece. 

Speak ash, speak garment, speak pinkening desert. Every word made grain.

          1:13

Theodore of Mopsuestia observes “the very beginning of his words is a threat.” And yet: here we may pause and think about what we place upon the body, our bodies, any body. The forest making something slowly deaf. The wind’s great door, even hunger, a vagrant lobe (began first to preach its living word). Or: the body’s broken prayer, prayer’s discarded gate, another flesh strung with sleep—its guest-song. 

Inside night, day clothes the blue wind, the yellow thorn, all of it. Handsome root of the pomegranate. The eye, dead and cold among those green hungers.

          1:14

The unavailable ordinances whisper among themselves. They seem troubled. They keep touching their pale wrists, their heavy jurists’ robes. 

Everybody’s here, the nurses from their weathered cottage, death’s blue map and sine-garment. Something is shifting slowly yet in the tortured ground. The corn’s beautiful tongue sleeps away the hewn night, its ivory amplitudes.

          1:15

Write “temple” (or: the writing temple). Sweet little animals hands beneath the photograph, a scrap of winter grass. Bread-psalms, bread-psalms. Memory asked its sweet gun, What will we place in our wine vats, our granaries, our storehouses now?

          1:16

What is authentic the wind breaks, across its broad thigh. 

People ask: why must the war be beautiful? 

Father, don this broken church.

          1:17

Smallest forest among the animals, friend hunger once again in the goldbitten light. Hunger’s eye, heart-passage. My heart’s breath wandered, lame, in the desert. 

Seeds shrivel beneath their clods, or else their shovels, every husbandry to its own mute tent, oxen stamp in their enclosures, beasts of burden rot in their own dung. 

Honey-fruit of the eye, withdrawn. Nothing will bring to blossom the wound’s mute leaven. Salt shimmers like glass in the air, death’s sapling deep in the body. 

So film the corn as it withers, its bread-shadow, the city’s black pavane or tangent. Little blindbody, set the thorn-water in the smallest field. Alive, alive-O.

          1:18

On the perplexity of the animals: Depending on the rescension the cattle weep, or the sheep weep. —Always, either way, weeping beasts.

Naked country, word-shadow behind the incision-hut, the broad red seed of village life. Now another chalk town, feast of blue wounds, strung gourds, the desert’s taut and perfect throat.

The problem of the desert in winter. The problem of drowning, how it is, how can it be that some drown, in night’s war-glass.

Late into the night I studied the grafting of figs, the number of horses and their errands, the distinction between scythe and scroll. —Always, either way, weeping beasts.

          1:19

First-flame. A glass expanse, its long turquoise border placed against the prophecy’s bleak day-heart. It’s true, I’ve always lived in the burning orchard. But the dense bone of the heart’s red winter must lily. A lily-dream on the burning sea.

The bone of the heart, what we habitually call the heart, knows nothing of the empty hives of love, that God-hum (in winter’s lead machine).

The dense bone of day made breath (inside death’s dissuasive limit). A pitted honey—

          1:20

Now the animals reparate their Word, no longer final (tempered in its falling-guise). The pastures of the wilderness, the beauties, the charming things, the pastures of the range (as some would have it)—fire is faith’s special friend, its third arm, its crutch.

Somewhat later, Jonah will cattle even the cattle to repentance.

          2:1

Night’s saline weft. We let the trumpet vine take the stump on which the mailbox was mounted, then the mailbox itself, orange throats studding the clump like snakes on some Medusa’s head around which every insect seemed to buzz, fixed, intoxicated (“intoxicated children,” Cyril of Alexandria suggests). The density of cicadas calling in the darkness enveloped us in a slow wound, as if night’s green skin were some planet sleeping. Cicadas are not locusts, are in fact taxonomically unrelated, but they do look the part. Every winter ghost is blind, yes, but this was summer’s phantom, a ghost’s ghost, something to touch-through, faith’s green throne with its orange heralds, their music sifting towards and into the nerve-church again and again. A little beautiful water (called the tongue), a catchment, a basin: cool little hand, perfect like the blond vestment Christ bears His feast inside. I pulled it tighter around my shoulders, thighs. Music offered love’s almost-grammar, a pleasant bread we carried in the mouth. Its cache of honey handed wine another death.

Eventually the postal service refused to deliver our mail. Music’s ancient visage, the beautiful surface of the soul (another wound, yes) in the baptismal acre. We chorused: Build a little garment-shadow / from the marriage song, wake its water. Because even the unseen grain almost has a title now, a church, a debt, a prayer. In June, the storm’s heavy touch, a bit of night waiting just inside the glass. Oxygen’s spastic ash, its pilgrim-mouth. Speak body, pale wine-forest of the hidden bride.

          2:2

Thus begins the catalogue of resemblances. (Everything now is winter amid my song, even love’s humid dreamway across which my people row at night.) 

What destroys: the honey-factions, each borne on its creche of rust. Say, like dawn spread out against green hills; a living debt endowed in faith fumbles the Christ-latch (my fingers, soiled with breath and rest). Say: light’s passage, almost a new tongue.

Speak the feast, o beautiful bone machine spread against the hills like dawn.

Like dawn, return unto me, famished, crusting reef of your long step at dusk, or any darker tune. I will release you into the wound the forest made, its fleshy gate.

          2:3

Neither fire nor body, touch’s savant jab, the surface of the soul waiting, a censure in the twilight. Smell the animals sleeping (when faced with war).

Like every partisan, man knows fire’s mineral heart. What I’m talking about is something else,the darkness behind fire, its fragrant blood-vault. Eden’s warm forest recumbent and lithe within every schism, every palace. A day-tongue cast towards level ground, every pilgrim within the self names what is beautiful, verb or church.

Neither night nor sky, like all bodies so beautiful when the war touches them.

          2:4

What destroys us: is like horses, bears the heads of horses, is like horsemen, no, resembles horses fitted for war. What destroys us: moves swiftly, sharpened like an ark.

Go, photograph the soul’s empty Christ.

          2:5a

Not like chariots but like the sound of chariots, at the summits of the mountains, music’s terraced debt and archived brow. Let’s say even a nest among the snow’s indrawn breath. Listen for its blood-tide, its milk-tide.

I climbed to where you showed me lilies rustling, in the shadow of old snow.

Gently, the bone-machines ruck the blood. (God knows every sky.)

          2:5b

Not like the sound of chariots but like the hiss of fire, faith’s eye-stub, the eyes caught burning in prayer’s lavish net. The field-smell comes at night, as memory. Take the honey-rind of war, everything dusk smears. A wedding-whisper, debt’s burning mote. Little eye, close to the burning hum or living feast, the feast made passage (anent my sleeping thought). What’s more, the heart’s clean lambs worship ash. Salt-kirk or day-bone, listen: even a blue mercy knows this castaway world.

          2:5c

Winter-elm, winter-breath, winter’s water: pale soul-beasts, their cloth hands at large among the assembly, glass fabric dense with the elm’s excision, the chestnut, the ash.

          2:6

The oldest hive scrapes a little flesh from the heart, or the heart’s surrogate: is heard as mere beast among the blackened monuments. In the field around the tongue, Christ’s garment-song. Cleanse one’s house of every midnight plasma.

Self’s onyx scaffold, mitigating the watch. The animals never make God their bride.

          2:7

Or, like athletes, the white houses dream in medieval time, cruelty’s scarred city.

          2:8

At home among the officers, the scar all but stilled by the dead’s glass touch. Fire in music’s compound eye, a visible god cast like prey against the forest, that distal liturgy. Perhaps the eye parts in the heaven of animals, a great silence whither every shadow lay glistening, the flames’ brined felon, flesh-friend to God. I’m sorry, I’ll demonstrate the trick again: we are unmaimed. The forest’s heavy children watch.

          2:9

Or perhaps the body lies deep enough, after all: a bright leaven, song’s medieval guide or gaud. (I say music but I mean theft. Just think how much things tell, from their circle inside the fire. Someone gathers empty fruit, city prayers: to have and to hold.)

The windows, though: they touch hunger’s eye, the clean wolf-eye of this vagrant world. In the little bell-clearing of the body, reach out, carefully touch the eye of God (like a sparrow waiting). Sing your wolf-hymn to the eye of God through the lips of devastation’s fist, hand’s smallest antiphon—its ancient edge, ridged and teething.

          2:10

Let’s call it a lamp, the door’s tiny brother. Milk’s new town, always the greater light—rhythms of siege and shelter.

2:11

The locusts have no king, suspended like souls queued beneath unyielding glass.

(The dead make sense as animals, perhaps—memory’s half-thawed grove, its copse of pollards, waiting. Tooth, friend, I call upon the forest’s million broken eyes.)

          2:12

You go to work in the factory, and then the factory goes to work in you. The sheriff draws his circle of praise round about your lesioned feet, in yellow paint. Thus your pitiless ancestors seared the Earth around that cool spring—

          2:13

and REND your heart, which like a garden shimmers in prophecy’s crude wavelength. You, hive-tongue, gate of flesh. Dream now, come touch death’s white sea.

You can almost hear time among the beasts, these stones. Insect time, apparel time. (Jabès: “In the desert, fire is a mockery.”) Invisible season of the wayfeast: now.

          2:14

Forsaken, this patch of earth in day’s quilt. My observance, pillaged by flame, taught me fever’s gospel. As for pageantry, a bit for psaltery and shawm:

In the field I found a book.               

It was covered in blood.          

In the field I found a star.               

It, too, was covered in blood.          

I gathered both in my apron               

and took them home,                         

to wash them—          

How they screamed.

The question I asked, again and again: what sort of music did lepers make? for themselves? or for others? If we knew this, would love still be possible?

—What is the ferryman’s citizenship, is what I thought I heard you ask. My mistake.

          2:15

Free lily, free radical, free märchen, free church—echo’s flagrant priest. A hungry octave charts faith’s russet tone. The mowers turn from their labor, left destitute among strange languages; they see straight through the animals’ long days, their libraries of pain. Inside the forest-made wound, the green breath of the world—

You can hear it, the shofar’s clean and makeshift perigee, hapax legomenon. An ark, a nest, an eyelash’s delicate camber between you and all that lightning.

          2:16

Parliament of nurses, the city’s clear motion-banquet, any flesh will do. I smote a milk in its orphan fleece, that you carry. Schism decrees, loudly, starve the tent.

          2:17

In which the priests of the past salute the priests of the stranger across dust’s copper shore. In which, without music, the body makes hair, mostly. Rather gather day in the dead’s soft hands. Because one may make a body without music, one may set the stones closely, carefully (and call that weeping). Or, the hand’s lame animal takes sole possession, almost visible. Take heaven, left back among its glittering primes.

(As for gossip: the eye’s mercury, lame mammal in day’s mouth. Work the prey as cladding, cloak, zeal, something the heart let back in amidst the city’s silent reign.)

I lift the myth from its yellow plate and set it back down again. There is no sense in treating the alphabet as a trembling in the forest. In darkness, your green mouth shaping the right name when I turn.

          2:18

Punctual, this revolution. (And the nurses in fear of [wolves] [wasps] [leviathan] fold the washed bandages, replace them gently on night’s shelf.)

          2:19

The dead, long since manifest, make their orchid-ways inside the flesh. Children nestled outside the heart may lift their heads, may seek the palace prayerfully glistening among thorns. Now, little city, cast and gather—cast and gather what ye will.

          2:20

The great dark chancel of the body’s bell (orchid of the invisible) laves its Galilee.

Day’s blind odor, left lame in the blood-ark, less darkness than a voice (a ghost, a theft, a pressure).                                                            

—What does it preach, Master?

          2:21

The first address is to the land, and it goes like this: want carefully, and fear not. (A pentatonic scale.) The world’s flesh-course, acute possession waiting in the still eye of the muscle, a god (like a god, waiting)—its plangent folds. Myth asked the world for its organs, two ancient wars by the great granite sea.

Go, Master, quietly outside the body. This page bears where night crept, breathing.

          2:22

The second address is to the beasts, not all of them but those “of the field” with their vested interests, their broken, tiny sacraments, what never a tongue nor house might heal. Ho, beasts of the field! The world bears its difficult eye, which you may now drink.  Drink the eyes, yes, before the great milk sea and all its most tender prosthetics— 

                                                the cold tongue’s Christ-tenement, sleeping music’s master-green.     

          2:23

The third address:   to the children:   say it slowly, bring the gift to bear:    the instruction, NOW, MAKE A TOWN. The silence behind every page, a worship-well. Really, just try: be God’s prelate grove, always a bright silence in the mouth.

The former rain, the master teacher, God bears within His body (or almost, so the animals aver and affirm). Yet cast not away the dawn glade’s piping music, nor turn every breath towards fire, sleeping.  Men learn almost nothing through time, the skin’s single lymph, that worships day.  —Hence, a new town.

Tell us new things, the smallest distance friendship measures. Go on, try. I dare you. I’m watching. I hold the bow in my hands.

          2:24

Every great waiting’s last call and rhythmic cast (set fast into touch, a blind dart).

First gather every orchid, read the testament.   First the chapel, first the axe.   First gather something blind, then further along, the beautiful city (like a flesh) opens.

          2:25

At the point God turns and, heard (the things man proves impossible!), stows His blue breath: another finite point, neither gash nor gland. God’s silent prey, clearing the blind from the presence of some other god(s). Pray away, as the dead gloss the field, part skin, part knowledge.

          2:26

Taste the lily’s broth.  Taste the breath-sine.   Taste the black bread of the poem’s city-heat.   Savor winter’s mouth-speech, its smallest sea.   Taste this winter-Christ, the church clothed in exile.   Taste warmth’s green mercy, upon which the children sprawl.   We think they’re sleeping.   We hope they’re sleeping.   Taste the waiting fruit, make the green tooth suckle.   and yes, the small room once appointed for the lepers:   take me there, (silence’s) true and perfect stent, inside its prone mammal.

O taste and see, little glass church of the blind eye, heat-bearing, fur-bearing, little glass town. Empty light within this new little town. Empty light within new glass, as if sleeping.

          2:27

The eyelash:   not ashamed.   The master-body:   not ashamed.   Time’s eye knows everything like all prostheses, cast around worship. Day’s million hands bind the sea.

          2:28

First, touch the past’s page, its lucid well.   Then, empty the past.   First, call the church together, I mean from within man.   Two bodies well-met asked the world: who bears the animals’ scapula? What is surfacelessness? To whom have I cleaved?

          2:29

Friends, this is important.  God presses forward:  towards time, light, music. I am merely your brother-lamp, creaturely in every aspect.   But:   we can be visited. Sleeping perhaps outside our first door the cold eye’s miles and miles of nought. Night’s gum bears silence’s cast, whither shall we nurse?

Imagine the space around a child’s discarded kite, mollusc in the rubble. Next, imagine what the dark might bear, if the dark could carry. Then, imagine the dark. Everyone circle, watch, imagine, turn. The hand’s small eye-tent, its plasmic skin. The hand, tuned to prey’s zeal, glistening (outside, among prey’s silent fires). 

Healing: part stone, part invisible touch.

          2:30

A brief catalogue of wonders: everything music bodies forth, part flesh, part orchid, part God.  Beryl.  Heaven’s empty fruit, that science sucks. Things bent outside the making world, for instance the two great margins passing across time.   Prey’s possession, like all small debts visible in any green thought.  (Omit Mutter Museum, Fractal Museum, National Children’s Museum of Exploding Toys.   Omit wild horses.)

The tongue’s lamp, anatomically correct.   Smallest night creatures, around which myths clothe and muster.  All matter.  War’s bright, greasy trumpet.  Any desert my brother bears, in lieu of a church.

          2:31

That sound—locusts?  Tongues of fire?  A dew in the high places.  Let the animals tell the lost what lame worship wanted, after all.

          2:32

Broken, like the great light in breath’s house—Call. This time, it’s a choice, as with apparel. Little mouth, every glass takes your sharp hand.

Place the call upon the body.  The eye’s milk-well, a brotherly stone.  Time’s vast broken music, over which your badge passes.

Let me tell you what I taste:  the church’s difficult silence (vs. the forest’s). I think of you tonight, having been abandoned by another lover, greater. Sometimes, the sea bears touch’s silence away.

3:1

Where distance went, later, there is always a second master. I stood in the court of the prison and spoke of poetry with another man, a younger man. At that point I remained unscarred, I bore all the usual organs within my one regular body. Even the blood, the breath must house ancient children, I volunteered—Christ bears nothing green (through the eye) was his response.  Each week I made the trip, sometimes alone, on foot, sometimes with the beast who was, for a time, my companion. (O companionate beast.) War’s music makes the tongue hum. He had, the young man told me, no memory of the crime for which he had been sentenced, although since he woke, later, covered in that blood, he presumed his guilt. At the shore, later, splendid creatures went on imagining nothing, breathing in the great dark cold skin of the sea.  The church makes everything quite small and every war a friend, he guessed.  I thought:  heal this green well, Master; heal the night, or whatever time calls its other king, brother-arson, sibling-sea, every sensible sorrow: set the lamp to worship, fly.  Then I moved from that place. I read in the newspaper, in the light of the trumpet vine, when his appeals ran out. Take back either birds or (invisible)memory, I argued: with distance, the lamp’s skin at the door’s blind edge. Sent, yes, and yet the proper chaplains must find this tedious—all this broken talk.

          3:2

The first of the cipher-valleys, where the wind had sculpted the tongue’s brute respiration, a breathing skin. Two difficult things: the mouth, sleeping; milk. What does the tongue worship, then? I thought, perhaps just touch Christ’s door, and go.

          3:3

On the buying and selling of children:  for the cash to purchase a prostitute, or for wine.  (Elsewhere:  for silver, or a pair of shoes.)  I had written:  if a math, I hope / a clean / equation— 

                                                            that for which one casts lots, if one is a soldier (and who, in this century of war, is not a soldier?). Cast away, behind the famished arsenal, the milk-sense of the animals, this war’s lamp, alert and choiring.

          3:4

Or, you can bet on the girl, as the soldiers say, Earth’s maimed green nescience. But you must read silence’s beautiful tower first, its aria at the edge of the sea. 

Turn always inside the blood, speak. Brother, close the organ-case, lock the glass.

          3:5

My goodly pleasant things:  everyone’s last armistice, whether perhaps marking out another pain or waking the incision.  Reparation plays nightly.  Empty light, make sense out of the nothing that brought you here, bedighted.  Speak first, green tooth (or suitor; I track your cinders among the potsherds, the blazing marquee).

Even the hawthorn is susceptible to triage, war’s cataract and theorem-torch. Except that nobody steals a hawthorn. The palette hauled from the village in its canvas sack: all the master tones, their stitch and fletch.  You said, Nothing that man imagines blinds the eye. 

          3:6

Go up, thou bald head. Go up, thou— (Enter bear.)

Now take the children away, back past all visible flesh.

          3:7

Meaning, then, the resurrection (in facsimile, at least). I want to say this very clearly: LITTLE NIGHT CREATURES, PLACE ME THERE, AMONG THE TWILIGHT BODIES. Me, always the last child brought lame to the sea’s myth.  Which is why, when you said “Set a place for everything, even the war,” I did so.  In exile.

          3:8

It’s the logic of Job’s daughters all over again: children, children, we can always make more, you sell mine, I’ll sell yours. Yet breath perhaps lay near, a tiny town, came within a few bright motes of pearl, of echo....                                                                                 Speak, Master, imagine music.

The resurrection, though: try blood’s mouth-glass, the tongue’s heavy blood.

          3:9

Prepare:   sharpen the fountains to their diamond depths. Stock the chapels with broken glass, salt the avenues. I could myself play a long note on a wren’s thigh bone—having killed a wren, or found it dead. Your breath Magdalenes you, partisan.

          3:10

What the dead man thought first, he thought with his tongue: all the old stories agree. Also the broken page must first mask the blind, and suffer. Friend, tell me a little about the Earth, your place among its robes, its master-distance. Milk the bodies (of their pasts, their castes; later, music). Yet the sea’s broken tower, everything the eye wears, Christ’s bright patch.  The fields lie unattended, the orchards all destroyed (locusts, fires, armies).  I who lived in the burning orchard now live in the burnt. In the distance, people queued to view the bodies in long rows.

          3:11

Almost legibly the white uniform assembles itself.  Thinking lends a combustive edge to God’s discrete direction, towards which the sycamores bend. “I do what I do in sensely ways, not crazy ways.” Sprinkle the sulfur where previously clean things had rested, where the ache raised a boil. “Red thing hung up like on a cross”—don’t be afraid of the dead, the veil’s “potential visitors, with labors and contradiction.”

          3:12

Enamel, fossil, abdomen:   Awake

          3:13

and thrust in the sickle, because it’s harvest time again. (I read that on the threshing floors, within the vintagers’ presses “traditional morality was often relaxed,” which enabled something like informal courtship. Comes music’s heavydrawl, friendship’s dusk-academy, a little bell inside the body chiming softly at, say, Compline. Friendpain, the blond room’s sea-lantern, which I sense rather more than I actually see.)

3:14

The second of the cipher-valleys, every second stone through which the night passes (never quite enough).  God’s little forest, broken off inside the church. Speak now, dark edge of time’s carafe: multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision, glass’s single distance borne right through this nave of the world and its crutched celebrant. Little night-companion, sharp lamp:  I don’t tire of your blurred rood, your anxious chrism. Let the mason gouge every stone, let him fill all the wards of the infirmary.

(Theodore of Mopsuestia’s variant text reads “sounds rang out in the valley of judgment.”  That, too.)

          3:15

Which is to say:   we will choose, yes, but in darkness.   (Will we be judged in darkness?)

          3:16

The vintager’s knife, an ancient implement, related to the grafter’s knife. A sociable debt, very loud knives, as far as knives go. Look, here I have a diagram of one. You may cover your ears, you may set your mouth as a dwelling among the evergreens.

          3:17

In their natural park, the strangers ripple—the heat tunes them like instruments. You may hire a little ship to move among them. Fire’s labials suggest some sort of mouth-like part.

Shooting directly into the wall of ice, its abandoned sanitarium. Every shot’s gravity, as if the thorn of exile had been returned to us, borne on the backsides of living men.

          3:18

The third of the cipher-valleys: the Valley of Shittim, a.k.a. the Valley of the acacias, a.k.a. the torrent of rushes, a.k.a. the torrent of thorns. —We shall be at play in the torrent of thorns, indeed. The pasteurized groves towards which the dead resort (beneath hunger’s plank, lapsing green into war’s nerve). Animals bear the master-myth again, past the blind, past the palace.

May want, may lamb, may flock.                     Little blindbody, alive, alive-O.

          3:19

Exile slakes this, the event that’s imminent vs. the one that’s already happening, now.

A few earnest souls are still arguing over “trumpet” vs. “shofar.”  Mercy’s gift-toll (takes music’s wound and shadow, notches its leather belt). “Some have spoken, to be sure, of the reflection of the sun on the wings of insects.”  Shed as vowel-blood, love’s thinking lathe, abandoned trestle over which the moon’s bone travels.

We’re past the self-disclosure oracle as well as the assurance oracle. One critic notes, “waiting is a mighty deed.”

          3:20

Or, not locusts, rather “peoples, tongues, governments, and kingdoms.” Can you feel me when I touch you here (pause), here.  Concede the form of a question, concede form as a question, and what then?  Another almost-wound traveling through the forest at night.

But we may dwell here, we are permitted. The third garment may keep its guest. (See my entry in the Book of Guests, see “skein of birch,” milk’s lame worship.)

          3:21

On the cleansing of the blood:  from the tooth to the fig to the yoke.  The young bride, or widow, snatched from sight, a parched toy.

The truth, when it comes, pronounces. How many incisions are required?

The tools the priests bear in mourning may also be cleansed, for they are cast in blood. I was there, I slew their armies. (Remember, the locusts have no king.)

     *

Perish, nation of pierced children.  I wrap you in my flag of questions; I will not watch the messengers come from death’s distant city—they know me by a different name. The clouds deny that they have broken me. Brothers, surely you know all the ancient plays:  the child with cancer, the desolate palace of unrequited love.  Wars versus their generals, surely the smell from the streets was a dream’s long incubation.  At dusk, the long shadow cast by simple bread—I stand in it, it’s my child—God blinked once, twice and then night’s lavra descended. In this place three swans, two living, one dead—pain’s Rorschach: two elm trees, no, an idle lover on a fire escape, smoking, no, an animal with the hide of a map.  Faith reigns here, invisibly.  I wash the stone steps, which are my prayers—with my rags I wear them clean of inscription, day after day.  Many corpses decorate the landscape of faith, which is my country. Bees nest in their softening lungs, as Milosz claimed. It’s not a dream, what we’re capable of.  Or else some slender green shoot pierces them. And that’s good, right? That wick of compassion, so far from any sea—my warder’s back is arable land, facing the plow. It is possible, it must be (theoretically) possible, to build a city from corpses. I stepped out onto the rock shelf and undid my sadness, let it fall from my chest and loins. I asked, how do I wake a trap from its long sleep, as of tears? I dwelt in the side of a tired hill, like a rib or a cancer.  Even there, the servants of the state came to me. Even there, unmarked graves bound in tongue. There was a harp I wanted to buy.  Someone else bought it first, though my credit was good enough (at the kiosk of available harps). Still, I felt, I thought, sometimes, its puncture in the night.  Out of the pot, cleansed of its fine sand, faith, ready to be devoured. Instead I rubbed it on my arms, my chest, both cheeks perhaps this was the problem:  I didn’t know what to do with faith, what others did with faith.  When the musicians began to play, I neither danced nor sang nor mourned.  I watched them, lined up like teeth in the darkening hall.  I built a bridge with it, or tried to. It fell deep into my throat, lodging there like a clef, a scar.  You see I am terribly serious, though I laugh often. It’s death that laughs in me, a king I once knew.  The uncircumcised graves of my terror provoke me, captain.   (Thy trumpet preacheth blood, friend.)  What they required of me was my wife, outside the house of praise.

NOTES

Prefatory to writing this poem I referred to two ancient commentators on Joel (Cyril of Alexandria and Theodore of Mopsuestia) and two modern commentators (Hans Walter Wolff and James L. Crenshaw).

Section 1:12 refers (“the marking song”) to Karin Tidbeck’s novel Amatka. Section 3:11 appropriates quotes from Alabama folk artist Emmer Sewell (in interviews conducted by William Arnett, from Souls Grown Deep, vol. 2, pp. 178-191) and from René Char (from The  Word  as  Archipelago, p.29 in Robert Baker’s English translation).

Thanks to John Estes and to Spark and Echo Arts for commissioning this piece.