I light a cigarette, my dead mouth steaming
with vapors of its own. One jellied eye
splits out of sleep, and blood comes up from
dreaming
in poisoned wells, while the bell-driven sky
scuds to St. Joseph’s just across the river
calling the Sunday Irish, hands together,
to walk the incensed aisle of the Forgiver
under His eye, His steeple, and His ringing weather.
A sip of coffee muddies on my tongue
and metal citrus savors how it is
to taste the melting wafer there among
the arches of the God. If I were His
would I wake sweeter? Suddenly there leaps,
like a dancer bursting naked from her cloak,
a swell of sun, and on the cloud that sleeps
up from the ashtray rears Our Lady of Lit Smoke.
Saints have seen less and gone with it to grace.
For such a light Nazarius lost his head
to the prefect Anolinus. It was Ambrose
who found the grave. As de Voragine said:
“From it there came a perfume wondrous sweet.”
Those old ones had an easy way with graves.
I wallow in the grave of my own meat,
watching the light exult, golden as all their Ave’s.
Ah well, I think, I shall not want at last
for the comic operas of the saint. I read
how Brixius charged with fornication passed
two miracles to prove him pure indeed.
Yet was he driven by an angry mob
for having called St. Martin an old fool.
So are all driven, but will the holy squab
testify for all before the Sunday School?
A music for the images of Sunday
under the ray that does if any will
to be God Mother to the light. I play
these rummages toward grace under the spill
of overflowing Heaven. The fat man’s prayer
is an easygoing random: I will raise
what images arrive across this air
until the sour of time be sweetened into praise.
The warrior image: Nelson in Sicily
drummed up a war to please the Hamilton whore,
and when he captured old Prince Carracioli
hanged him from a yardarm just offshore
then dropped him over. The next day at tea,
the cabin windows open and the old bag
passing the rum, the corpse broke from the sea
and stared out of blind eyes at the hero and his hag.
(I wonder if those blood-tubs ever banged
for better stuff. Sometimes I think I mean
it’s better to be Carracioli hanged
than Nelson diddled. And wasn’t Josephine
another whore?-There’s Empire from both ends!
I hear my teeth grind in the toast I chew
and ponder through what fogs the squab descends
there where the Irish eat their Christ and hate the
Jew.
A moral for the images of Sunday:
I think the world is less than its own light
aureoled on the smoke that sleeps away
from a fat man’s cigarette and morning rite.
What have they ever won but marzipan
from Mother Mush, or from the sticky lips
of such a tub as Hamilton, who man
the artilleries of God aboard His battering ships?)
The rhetorical image: Voltaire at sixty-one
wrote out a quarrel with the Lisbon earthquake
in the name of human dignity. Half a town
fell into its dark before it came awake,
because a mountain shrugged. And one old comic
(the victim of too much philosophy?)
dipped his pen in blood for a polemic,
declaiming for the mind against sheer casualty.
The silly image: Perillus, a smith of Athens,
delivered to Phalaris of Sicily
a brazen bull so tuned by cunning engines
that when a man was toasted in its belly
his dying screams were changed into a Moo.
The king smiled and the smith was first to sing.
Later Phalaris fell, and then he, too,
warmed into song to please the humors of a king.
Mother Illusion, Mary of Lit Time
how sweetly gone they flicker and have done!
Dante brought the universe to rhyme
in such a light. I sort out one by one
these pebbles from a beach of space and pray
from finite stuff some infinite gentleness
to offer the soft air and the bright Sunday
that joys the heavy man at play with his distress.
Ghost of All Shining, Vowel of Light
which rings my bones, gross in their morning stale,
I dream the swollen doe gone mad with fright
when the hound bells for her fawn. I dream the whale
anguished with milky love on the grating shoal,
the dove at the cat-shorn nest, the bitch in snow
by the dead man. My Lady Aureole
who are the gentlest man becomes, his good of
sorrow
these beasts are breathed out of my nearest wish.
For joy of them, bright mother, I pray let down
your shining on bird, beast, and fish,
till all things live, and all things lack conviction
of all but light. A fat man breathes this prayer
in sight of skinny death who teaches all
the joy man breathes from the blood-burning air,
and that man stands most tall measured against his fall.
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