If you would know how to draw the wings of angels
From the alveoli whereto the air between us climbs,
You would be able to fly
The heart like a kite.
We remember to look for love but Swedenborg knows:
Man does not know what love is;
(How will you find it?)
He says: He is wholly unaware that love is his very life.
I watched Man’s thought and speech and action, where there is
No inclination from the heart,
Grow sexless, neutral,
Cold, reposessed and substituted by artifice.
Now, turning slowly, one step by one Venutian day at a time,
Out of know-how into frosty conditions,
He will have to use a heart-pump to keep the blood respirated:
His mental powers compressed into an emotional tank
That gives you water to breathe.
Instead of loving his soul back to life to the flow
Of the day setting and rising,
He will have to climb into a sunbed
And melt like the cheese in a toasty
For a volume of warmth large enough to wrap around his lingam
And libate the god-spot.
For all the damage that you do, O, Man,
The impatient rape, the perverse inquiry, the demands that couch your insecurities,
And the impediments you raise by which to test your inventivity,
Pitting woman against man, having her and him both forget -
In the last sanctitiy of togetherness remaining to them -
How perfectly woman or man (or maybe not) they were born;
With the knowledge for being wholly woman or man (or not);
Bodies for god-given maps, moral compasses and astrolabia.
Vessles to sail, not bone bags to rip and stuff, and sew back up again.
Not fashion magazines, manuals for domestic appliances,
Or blank CVs
To fill in on the dotted lines;
But to love
As only Man can,
Each
Other,
Knowing the other as
One
Self.
It took me 35 years to dare to look
At a man’s face and watch him come
By himself, but for love.
There can be nothing romantic about it.
It is too powerful and commanding.
(How else to sacrifice one's elixer for another life?)
Love hurts where it soars and
It hurts where it is not.
To sit still and do nothing is not the solution.
We must practice at being the I am that I am
Before we might come to a point in time
When nothing more need be said at all
And all is said in love.
May his lover witness the strangled affirmation that this will be so.
It is to exercise one's Strength
In between reading the Runes and Death.
It is lamentable - hence the walls at which we wail - that Force can be brutal
Or heroic with little distinction on the face of it.
We do not become gods when we love;
We lose God when we do not love.
We are not at all outside love.
We are alike in love.
Likeable enough thanks to love.
We are dharma bums
And love like noble monks
In all earnest and bodhisattva dedication,
Concentrating on the love incarnate
Rippling through the body,
Gathering morality with which to
Declare: I love!
But if it is not to be Pablo Picasso painting
Las Meninas or Goya's filicidic cannibalism
Or because we cannot all be genius:
A post-it that reminds us to buy cat food, have the car fixed,
And inbetween The Days Of Our Lives
And Friends and Casualty try to summon the power to churn
Sex into a lubricant of the brain,
Which is not the leavening agent that raises Mankind and
The milk that nourishes our infant desire to grow up and be great,
We must be patient and heal the pain with abeyance
And touch the warrior with mildness.
There is not point in escaping to the wilderness.
Beware of its savagery that does because it can, effortlessly.
I watched a man come,
Almost unable to bear it
Like a stabbing and a crushing and a throbbing,
Uncertain what it meant
But presuming that it signified
A submersion into death and the incipience of love
For Man by man in God's Name -
Just like Solomon sang
And the Seer of the Tribe of Asher saw....
Rembrandt, "Simeon's Song of Praise" (1631)
There is no other coming.
Adam came, he saw, and conquered gravity
Erecting a tower at Pisa, or the greatest egg-duomo ever built in brick to rival it,
For the Lady of the flowers, the red and the white
Of the womb and the Chest
That gives good gifts as Pandora knew she could - but
How without the love of Goodness, that neither surges nor insurrects
But surgically removes with precision engineering
The hurt
That is all
I am not?
How to cry?
We live in sets of seven trying.
If not to rain in puja, upside down back into the place we came from?
The receiver may never receive the light that lightens,
as when Simeon and his Prophetess could.
When he opened his eyes again -
After he had fallen asleep –
He found himself kneeled before the woman clothed in the sun
With the moon beneath them and the stars around his head.
Crowned with the eternally feminine knowledge,
He was now able to use the Maria-Isis gift of spirit-matter and love
With or without the tokens that mark the deed that love is.
He understood the seeds were already sown and not from his packet.
His strewn add nothing to the expanse; they germinate to extend
In a tension which must be resolved before the end.
His pen strokes sketch her wings.
CREDITS
- Vivek Doshi took the photo of the kite and uploaded it to Unsplash
- More on the Shiva Lingam Puja (worship) here
- Hannah Brock took the photo of the brightly multi-coloured prayer flags, copyright free and found on Unsplash
- Watch the film for more hermetic imagery on the nature of our Adam-Eve nature in, "Fruit of Paradise" (Czech: Ovoce stromů rajských jíme), 1969, directed by Věra Chytilová.
- Complementary to this film, I find, would be to study the Alchemical, Hermetic language of Hieronymus Bosch in "The Garden of Earthly Delights" with the help of (for example) C.A.Wertheim Aymes or Catharina Barker.