Posted by brian long on October 12, 1998 at 10:40:39:
In Reply to: "The Bust of St. John the Divine Regards a Dark Corner" posted by J. Bennett Jasmin on October 11, 1998 at 22:45:42:
The first seven stanzas were to me a sketch done with pencil
on white paper. It was intricate, complex, and no less art
than the Marble Bust of St John. But it was the last stanza
that added color to the work, and turned it into a piece that
left me, as usual, in awe of our Anaxagoras.
Anaxagoras, Anaxagoras,
you have lain your words before us.
You haven't failed a time
to impress us with your rhyme;
you haven't a muse, teacher, but a chorus!
--brian long
: One:
: Turquoise is the secret
: of the sea, folding
: its appendages, recoiling.
: Its parameters are islands
: large or small; its retreats simple
: geneses, elliptical ringing
: with the swallowed ocean.
: Rock and palm, the island
: is also a secret of the sea,
: dormant, roaring, mountainous,
: displaced.
: The island, the island! "Ne pouvez pas porter
: cela tout seul," the meridians--
: knowledge like Galileo's,
: part of the triune sea.
: The island is a percentage from necessity
: its dilation in a segment of eternity
: encompassing to continents, even touching
: the edge of mysteries with daring
: bravado like a flea.
: A proposition, ergo: small space exists
: inside a box. If the box were larger, or say
: the island smaller . . .
: or from inside a box of bone
: with dim corners
: one could reach out, change rules,
: slough off the sea itself . . .
: centimeter by centimeter, meridians
: of galaxies . . . the percentage
: of the sea is a ruling majority.
: There is no part
: or even part of a part
: beyond fathomless space.
: One (2):
: A marble bust of St. John rests
: on its pedestal in
: the silent nave. One may still
: hear whispered thundering.
: In life he wrote
: with hands less delicate than scholars',
: his arms criss-crossed in lines
: of heavy nets and summering.
: On Patmos One opened up the sky,
: One explicated prophecy,
: One stood with fearful glistening
: on fiery feet. At those feet
: John learned tasks of death
: and solitude.
: The isle--like his bust--appeared
: a sculpture of the watery sea,
: its mountaintop a Sinai
: supported in the transparent green.
: Sinai was as Bethel was,
: as Patmos is, a place
: where One appeared.
: One (3):
: There is a pondering
: that is more than the sea.
: There is a vision of the sky
: more than cloud, or sun, or moon--
: beyond percentages.
: There is a knowledge, mountainous
: of islands discerning all
: the secrets of the sea.
: When ponderous images reveal
: themselves to the sea,
: and skies, reflecting clouds
: in surfaces below
: are manifest in the sea,
: these three agree in One.
: The source of all imagining,
: spaces where the spheres revolve
: full of gravities; the Eye
: whose single tear begat the Seven Seas
: delegates mountains, stones, and worlds
: where thunderings reverberate,
: directing winds to voiceless echoes.
: Selah.