I’ve come to think of this as my gnostic poem, or maybe anti-gnostic considering how it ends. It was written when I lived in Minneapolis. Top-heavy with an expensive education, I had left graduate school to live “up north” and become a poet, whatever that might be.
I was trying to make a religion out of art. Why not? We’re all hardwired for God, and we’re constantly reaching out to touch His face, thinking it belongs to us. To me, art was a beautiful shell. I was listening to music I couldn’t hear.
–
The Last Days of Heaven
I see so many of us
Wandering down to the end
Of an ocean pier at dawn, after
The party, the men in their yellow uniforms,
The ladies in brushed silk. The sea is calm.
Overhead, the Japanese lanterns sway
Simply in the breeze, their blue
Green pastel lights
Still burning, and we pause, all of us,
Looking up for a moment
At the clouds across the eastern sky,
Clouds upon pale clouds, and we hear
Huge, distant voices calling to one another
Like faint music, the sound rising and falling on the wind,
A few notes, sometimes a phrase,
Then nothing …
I believe in conclusions, in a final
Whiteness absorbing the unequal flesh,
Our lives turning beautifully away
From the dim,
Reductive beasts inside us.
I remember the lion,
The enormous peacocks bristling
On the palace lawn, and the ox
Raging, wild-eyed, swinging the beard of wolves
Hanging at his throat, desire
Frozen in a moment of blood and speed,
And the moment fades, effective and resolved.
I believe we’re approaching the essence
Of pure idea, all the lost energies of the world
Released formally in the mind. It becomes
A kind of grieving at last,
The beginning of peace as we congregate
In our brilliant white rooms, cool
And exhausted, like angels starving on sugar.
