Dead Sea Scrolls
What is the emotion behind Gnosticism if not the resentment of the unrequited lover?
The winter of our discontent named “God.”
The nothing that is there, that we pretend to be the nothing that is not.
God the Father. God the tantrum-thrower, God the grudge-holder, God the spoiled child.
God does not play dice with the universe. But when the Demiurge does, we call it God.
In blood and thunder, hyacinth locks drenched, the youth flies in with his No.
The blind stripling lisps his way through the streets of Dublin, searching for a surrogate father to help him cross to the other side. Heaven is a piano he must tune.
I gather bits, globs, fragments.
Not to shore against ruin but the shores of ruin. To walk along them, caught between the wreckage of the past and the blue indefinite. Picking up scraps. Sucking stones.
Nostalgia the intolerable temptation, the Whore of Babylon. Vitrine life.
Where is life? Inland. With the people who read clothes and faces instead of books.
Standing suspended six feet apart in crabbed constellations—the exploded families, corporations, lovers.
The red-winged blackbird feathers its nest and sounds its savage trills; it flies free of the human web. It refuses to become my symbol. Its refusal is my symbol.
Illiteracy is a prison but so is literacy. The headless cries follow me downstream. Red at the neck, face burnt orange, crying What have you got to lose?
The gray beard of Marx runs off his face like dripping water, making him young again. Can you meet his eyes in the mirror?
How long can you meet your own eyes? Time yourself. I’ll wait.
Light is the best disinfectant, and so is death. The composting action of the earth astonished Whitman. It astonishes him still.
When I was a kid I wanted to know everything because then, I figured, nothing could hurt me. These were my years of magical thinking. The encyclopedia was my spellbook. Life lived in advance can’t hurt you, because it isn’t life.
I got as far as D, I think. (Delta, Dirigible, Dweomer.) Maybe more than halfway into E. (Earthworms. Entelechy. Europe.)
Letters follow my name, calling it to come out and play. My name hides in the margins of the Book of Life, like Adam and Eve in the garden, guilty, waiting for the inevitable reader to come along.
In the cool of the evening, the destroyer.
The tree of life was cut down and pulped and pressed into pages, and black ink was printed on those pages, and a finger follows the figures described by the ink, picking out the letters unseen, unprinted, hidden and negative like the face of YHWH. LIFE printed in white fire.
Pyromancy lingered at leaves me searching in bones and ashes, lightlessly. The shores of ruin.
So decorate with the dreaming monks the margins with monsters, lovers, and wonders. The snake curls at the base of a capital, at the base of the T in The. Eve leans on the h, considering the apple, while the e is Adam hunched with his back to the scene, sitting on the ground, waiting for the last of the animals to come to him to be named. (Zebras. Zoophytes. Zooplankton.)
The tableau of the tree of knowledge in the moment before knowledge arrives. Another tree in the orchard goes curiously unforbidden and ignored. A tree separated from its brother by what? Human ignorance? The shore of grasses?
As yet uncut, the grasses waving, somewhere over my grave.
A few words, stones, rolled in the mouth. Walk away from this shore. (My own hands carried me there.)
Here endeth the lesson, suspended like a struck chord. Dying fall between music and silence.
Pile these stones as you will. Summer stones.
It was her own heart the snake offered to her, and she ate of it and gave it to the man, and he too ate. Greedily, sucking out the juice, chewing the pulp and rind, swallowing even the seeds of new life and death. They are their The.
Long life to them, our parents, until we become them and find ourselves bewildered and indefinite, perplexed at the base of a tree whose branches shade us, whose flowers scent the air, a tree of which we’re scarcely aware. But it holds up everything, it props up the sky and prevents it from colliding calamitously with the earth. If we glanced into its branches we would die, or go mad, or go blind. Or walk free from that blindness, blessed.
Walk onto summer’s shore, bathed in light, diving in water, spouting, surfacing. Clothes. Cleansed?
The indefinite waits for us, a paradoxical A.
Start out for it swimming strongly, tonight, and every night.
A shore, a scroll, a woman, a man, a stone, a red-winged blackbird, a book, a tree, a sun and moon, a city, a plague, a night, an hour, a dawn. A shore.