2024, 42”x 56”
Consider the Asp (The Resurrection Men)
“Can't you just imagine / digging up The King /
begging him to sing / about those heavenly mansions /
Jesus mentioned.”
—Warren Zevon
It rained so hard that a peregrine worm took
refuge in the keyhole while others, less fortunate,
clung to the door and spasmed slowly upward,
fleeing the saturated water table and crisscrossing
the rough fir; ascending pilgrims of blindness,
thankfully mute. She looked at me the way the other
saints must have looked at Patrick, when he drove the
snakes from Ireland.
“I never thought of that.”
* * *
It was good;
sequestered with silence,
surety, and still;
the moonless and starless,
the sunless
and sea-deep.
To begin,
the descent unsettles the spirit
as the earth’s light sets
behind the enfolding basalt;
but then it’s quiet—purgative, to be so obscured
by the sovereign desert,
unravaged
by dog or desecration.
It is as when sunlight’s strength
seems diminished,
when one opens their eyes
anew in summer,
assuming a blazing azure
only to find things lessened,
no longer immanent vision,
but at remove, and threatening
that it never blazed the deeper blue, or
that the world,
dull with ruin,
distils imposture—puppet truth.
Wonder comes in error here,
a children’s play;
the lines so badly bungled
that they brink upon salvation. So—
we loiter offstage,
whether Jonah recalls his lines or not
and peer into a view
that is both bright and dark—
but neither flame nor shadow.
Like the day they cried so hard
and you took them back,
for things
were no longer about soundness
but about love,
and love is never sound,
and then later it was they who judged
and were sound in it
and it was you who cried,
and it was a terrible, terrible noise to you
but by then, to them,
it was just a sound,
as distant to them as the first of clods
to ever knock the ear,
so light the wind would take it,
if we gave to it a will;
but we don’t do that now.
It marks itself in motion—
shows itself among the trees.
We linger,
as if those two together
were how we now remember speech,
though that’s not it exactly
and we puzzle before fetches,
and are spellbound by their summons
as on a path at nightfall,
weather gathering.
Never in film is light this flat,
yet this is where my wife will leave me;
so be it,
she must.
Reality dogs each dream,
and this real cast
gives the flatness substance;
the monosyllabic edicts depth. (Go).
She will close the door in leaving—
the coats fall otherwise. (Go).
It’s a borderlife,
a rumour of myrrh, a world
wrought by some other god
of the bent sky that numbers bequeath;
creating us in reducing us,
to what must be now and could never be other:
Resurrection Men.
And so there remains a voice,
a sort of Master Lighter,
contending that normal is the harder illusion,
requiring great attention,
and the full track of nature;
that neither flame nor shadow
will ever light upon you.
They walked you in, supine
on a bier of gold in cotton robes,
there to wed the universe
in a grace not afforded the living.
It was deep rest, and long,
and minded by time,
the great cat beside you
purring lightly in sleep;
balm to you,
vexing us,
stumbling in this tired dust,
seeking, always seeking:
Resurrection Men.
In a bore of sunlight, we punch alert the infinite
bearing mendicant curses
like cats might bring their masters birds.
The rocks slide and shift,
the low whispering
awed and flat;
grate, like pain wracks a body in morning,
lights a mind
and forces the door of thought.
To this cardinal theft we come; to wake,
to rouse again to history
as we are likewise lent to days,
and this ravenous, plaguing jury
beyond the transformed sands,
stares back in time as at flames—or farther,
starlight and its secrets.
Our high-resolution sun is a shadow throne
and one thinks how good the grave;
its figs and wine and oils and gold
and amid all this fire, its soothing cold.
We commute your obsidian term.
He is shapeless, unlike his progeny—
our Master-Lighter—
oblivious to slogan,
and it is his film in which we are now shining,
whose theatre is enjoying an unprecedented,
extended run.
It is his illuminations
to which we now attend,
even as she leaves.
But what to do with hands that cannot assume its shape?
How to cache the scarab
in the dead ear of Now,
to choose from endless imagoes?
Who is prophet? How?
It is the requisite sleight of revelation
that lacks a grammar to manipulate
or impose upon its bearer,
that in seeking monument charms hold
of those who seek its marrow force;
quick, or stillborn.
If it was a baby,
it would be a baby born eyeless,
an unspeakable thing
holding sway by its blindness;
any glance it encountered
marked ever with sight.
We are getting old
and surrounded by kickshaws,
that blurt their slogan and snap.
We vanish into sleep,
trespass into prophecy,
then wake to pester even peace
and barter off our solitude;
for barking and a dry mouth.
This hive of light will summon both:
those that swear and those that fear an oath,
but neither flame nor shadow
shall dwell upon thee here.
