Johanna Lisi Artist

Resonance Series

The Way Down

1.

Time swings her burning hands

I saw him going down

Into those mythic lands

Bearing his selfhood's gold,

A last heroic speck

Of matter in his mind

That ecstasy could not crack

Nor metaphysics grind.

I saw him going down

Veredical with bane

Where pastes of phosphor shine

To a cabin underground

Where his hermit father lives

Escaping pound by pound

From his breast-buckled gyves

In his hermit father's coat,

The coat without a seam,

That the race, in its usury, bought

For the agonist to redeem,

By dying in it, one

Degree a day till the whole

Circle's run.

2.

When the magician died, I wept,

I also died, I under leaf forgot

The stars, the distaff, and the crystal bowl.

I hugged the ignorance of stone

Under the line of crickett's thunder

Where the white chariot of the winter sun

Raced to the axle pole.

Why am I suddenly warm all over?

By the small muths of the rain

I'm tempted. Must I learn again to breathe?

Help me, my wordlings, leave

To the hoot owl in the dismal wood

His kingdom of blight

And empty branching halls.

Air thickens to dirt.

Great hairy seeds that soar aloft

Like comers trailing tender spume

Break in the night with soft

Explosions into bloom.

Where the fleshed out root stirs,

Marvelous horned strong game,

Brine-scaled, dun-caked with mould,

Dynastic thunder-bison, Asian-crude,

Bedded in moss and slime,

Wake, and the rhythm of their blood

Shoots through the long veins of my name.

Hail, thickets! Hail, dark stream!

3.

Time swings her burning hands.

The blossom is the fruit,

And where I walk, the leaves

Lie level with the root.

My brave god went from me,

I saw him going down

Incorrigibly wild

In a cloud of golden air.

O father in the wood,

Mad father of us all,

King of our antlered walls,

Our candelabrum-pride

That the pretender kills,

Receive your stumbling child

Drunk with the morning-dew

Into your fibrous love

With which creation's strung;

Embrace him, raise him high,

Keeping the old time young,

And hold him through the night

with the brilliance of the stars;

the whole of the earth was his to inherit

and his to share with every human spirit.

Eleanor Roosevelt: The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.