PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

and the splintery winds, all purity and secrets

and remembering.

Don't let me off lightly, God of all this,

I want every shard of

unbearable love, infinity

I needed to hear that today.  every shard of unbearable love.  Tells us we live...

The day slams shut with stars as your audience.  

Brillant

Debbie

more miracles from light passing through your unique prism:

'I am alone with this piercing audience of stars'

'untouchable

sea'

'at this altitude

I defy the gravity of 

everything

I thought I knew.'

'cackling lights'

The totality approach - God as audience for prayer and secular praise. Text book approach, spirit acknowledgment in the depths of doctrine based Faith but, like Palewngedpoetess, submerged also in the discipline and form of contemporary prose poetry. I always enjoy the infusion of lay syntax, friend to the ultimate friend as everything. Bravo for the celebration of dieties.

.

Lady A

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Helen Vendler, in her book, Words Chosen Out Of Desire, made the case that a reading strategy was necessary in approaching the cosmic vastness, and the verbal intricacy, of Wallace Stevens' poetry.  However, I think Vendler failed to suggest that certain poets achieve a level of greatness at which the only way to appreciate their achievements is to formulate a reading strategy:  not only Stevens, but Vergil and Statius, H.D. and A.E., and Patriciajj.  Most especially for our purposes here, Patriciajj.

   The poem's center of gravity, about which all of its words, lines and concepts orbit in a great swirl, is the metaphorical location that she calls, "the home we return to / every time we believe." It is well to keep in mind that she is not addressing her readers in this poem, it is neither didactic nor confessional; she is addressing God, in a sacrifice of praise (as the Biblical Epistle to the Hebrews declares), and therefore, it is a liturgical poem.  As I read it, this home we enter every time we believe contains a few "stitches of moon" in "creases of . . . centuries" and "cackling lights."  She seeks "infinity / in my endless frolicking Now."  This is a very shrewd understanding, because, for most (I would wish, all) of us, the present feels like an endless moment, not cognizant of our useful, but ultimately local and artificial, measures of time on our calendars and clocks.  Even the most cherished moments of what we call "the past" can seem like a present moment of which the actual present moment (what we call, the right now) becomes an extension.  We are linear thinking people---which resulted, I think, from the Fall---and we are being transported through this life on a planet that spins in a circle,while revolving in an ellipse around a star that traces a circle around its galaxy. The galaxies are flying from the Big Bang point in a linear progress, but cosmology predicts that linear progress will eventually lead to dissolution, the deadening of the four cosmic forces, and the coldening into entropy.  This will be forestalled, of course, as we who have Faith believe.  But all these have been set in the cosmos as metaphor.  That which rotates, revolves around its star as that star orbits its galaxy, is the seat of life.  In our linearity, in which we also keep a too watchful eye on clocks and calendars, while calculating how to avoid inconvenience, or how to prevent that associate at work from getting the promotion that we covet, we have forgotten kindness, as the Poet tells us.  We can blame some of this forgetfulness on the era of the Innkeeper, and he rightly deserves his portion of blame.  But the "flavor" of his era existed long before, in the century in which Revolutions murdered innocent adolescents for the "Good of the People," or slaughtered entire nationalities for the "Purity of the Volk and the Reich," or invaded helpless nations to rebuild "the glory of Caesar's Rome," or the "Pacific Coprosperity."  We live in a century that began with an apt metaphor---fifteen hundred people drowned at sea because a "captain" and a "managing director" piloted a metal hulk into disaster, in order to put profit, publicitiy, and self-aggrandizement over the kindness they owed to those dependent on their good offices.  The spirit of the Innkeeper was definitely present there; just as the spirit of the original Innkeeper, in the Lucan Gospel, tried to humiliate, rather than accommodate, two travelers and a third who was not yet born.  We have turned our forgetfulness toward kindness, and just dismissed it as inconvenient, inappropriate, unprofitable, and an abridgement of those rights that we so furiously believe belong to us by God's own decree.  And in protecting our inalienables, we have alienated those who need us most.  This is the kindness that she has forgotten, the kindness to which the cosmos bears witness, in the movement of moon, planet, and star around the galaxy---a kindness that gives us the gravity to remain in place rather than flying off like so much debris ejected by centrifical force.  What if the cosmos forgot its kindness to us, and turned against us---as we have turned against so many others.

   Cepheus is a constellation which, I think, she alludes to in the third line, in the audience of stars that is watching (or, as some say, attending upon) this liturgy of and in her poem.  And before this audience of stars, she does not ask for arcane or obscure knowledge, or power, or privilege:  she asks to be told more, about the forgotten kindness.  They tell me that, although the purpose of liturgy is to worship and praise the Deity, it is also to teach.  That is why the best liturgies include not only Scriptural readings but also generously season quotations from all over the Bible during the worship service.  David said, in Psalm 27 that he wanted to inquire in the Temple; and what temple was that, since the Temple in Jerusalem had not been built yet?  I think it was the same Temple in which Patriciajj's liturgical poem transpires and resonates:  that Temple in which even the stars attend.

I am going to make two comments on this poem, as I think courtesy and decorum require this.  The first, and more immediate, of the two is to thank you, most sincerely and personally, for the dedication of such a beautiful poem.  Wow!  Just reading a newly posted poem of yours in an event, but to see my name mentioned in the notes is beyond my words to describe, especially coming, as it does, less than 24 hours after one of my most difficult sessions in the ER, and the new degree of pain---screaming, literally screaming---pain that it revealed to me.  I thank you, and though I cannot speak in all of the languages of the world (I due good to manage in English), I would, if I could, thank you in all of them.