katabasis

Anna and Ben
Jefferson National Forest, 2009


Katabasis

Knowing this turgid bumbler’s teary bafflement will cease,
this sloppy, warm knot of blood and failure and shit
will slack and unravel in cooling ash or the cold pit,
this absurd creature will end, is comfort and release,
but that these two -- here twelve and eight, mugging at ease
for the camera as if their miraculous bodies will not forget
our few days of leveraged grace, our summer cabin sunlit
and shaded like the only emblem of my only peace --
knowing they will die, or, worse, tremble in fear of death,
as they will do, and soon, I would beat to shards the stone
that frames this fucking world or trade for their one more breath
this yet strong body and all the years still to weigh it down,
would damn any god for their pain and rip the sky down,
would howl in dark hell, where my father has gone before me down.

She had become my Sabbath

All Last Night

All last night I had quiet

In a fragrant dream and warm:

She had become my Sabbath,

And round my neck, her arm.

I knew the warmth in my dreaming;

The fragrance, I suppose,

Was her hair about me,

Or else she wore a rose.

Her hair I think, for likest

Woodruffe 'twas, when Spring

Loitering down the wet woodways

Treads it sauntering.

No light, nor any speaking;

Fragrant only and warm.

Enough to know my lodging,

The white Sabbath of her arm.

Lascelles Abercrombie

porcupine

some other year

I told you: look, it is snowing!

It was beginning 

just then, outside 

in the winter sunlight,

first flakes erratic and 

quick, from a cloud-

swept wilderness.

You were three years old.
I loved you, and

the same snow was falling 

in some other year

when I was lonely.

for Maggie, Anna, and Ben

(the dark language of autumn rain heard through the open window as i post this)

I cannot be grasped in the here and now. For I reside just as much with the dead as with the unborn.
Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual.

But not nearly close enough.

--Paul Klee

It is not possible for the moon

This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out

Of dirt . . . It is not possible for the moon

To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.

She must come now. The grass is in seed and high.

Come now. Those to be born have need

Of the bride, love being a birth, have need to see

And to touch her . . . .

Come now, pearled and pasted, bloomy-leafed,

While the domes resound with chant involving chant.

Wallace Stevens

from "Ghosts as Cocoons"

My whole mortality trembling to take thy body

from "The Eternal Wedding"

She:  What hast thou done to me! -- I would have soul,

Before I knew thee, Love, a captive held 

By flesh. Now, inly delighted with desire, 

My body knows itself to be nought else 

But thy heart’s worship of me; and my soul 

Therein is sunlight held by warm gold air. 

Nay, all my body is become a song 

Upon the breath of spirit, a love-song. 

He:  And mine is all like one rapt faculty,
As it were listening to the love in thee, 

My whole mortality trembling to take 

Thy body like heard singing of thy spirit. 

She:  Surely by this, Beloved, we must know
Our love is perfect here,—that not as holds 

The common dullard thought, we are things lost 

In an amazement that is all unware; 

But wonderfully knowing what we are! 

Lo, now that body is the song whereof 

Spirit is mood, knoweth not our delight? 

Knoweth not beautifully now our love, 

That Life, here to this festival bid come 

Clad in his splendour of worldly day and night, 

Filled and empower’d by heavenly lust, is all 

The glad imagination of the Spirit? 

He:  Were it not so, Love could not be at all:
Nought could be, but a yearning to fullfil 

Desire of beauty, by vain reaching forth 

Of sense to hold and understand the vision 

Made by impassion’d body,—vision of thee! 

But music mixt with music are, in love, 

Bodily senses; and as flame hath light, 

Spirit this nature hath imagined round it, 

No way concealed therein, when love comes near, 

Nor in the perfect wedding of desires 

Suffering any hindrance. 

She:  Ah, but now,
Now am I given love’s eternal secret! 

Yea, thou and I who speak, are but the joy 

Of our for ever mated spirits; but now 

The wisdom of my gladness even through Spirit 

Looks, divinely elate. Who hath for joy 

Our Spirits? Who hath imagined them 

Round him in fashion’d radiance of desire, 

As into light of these exulting bodies 

Flaming Spirit is uttered? 

He:  Yea, here the end
Of love’s astonishment! Now know we Spirit, 

And Who, for ease of joy, contriveth Spirit. 

Now all life’s loveliness and power we have 

Dissolved in this one moment, and our burning 

Carries all shining upward, till in us 

Life is not life, but the desire of God, 

Himself desiring and himself accepting. 

Now what was prophecy in us is made 

Fulfilment: we are the hour and we are the joy, 

We in our marvellousness of single knowledge, 

Of Spirit breaking down the room of fate 

And drawing into his light the greeting fire 

Of God,—God known in ecstasy of love 

Wedding himself to utterance of himself 


Lascelles Abercrombie
Emblems of Love