Self-Possession Is

Selfhood in the otherness of the self,
Otherness in the selfhood of the other,
Like a pair of eyes in a mirror,
Reversed so the right is the left
And the left is right, looking upon themselves
As the source (though it is
And is not the source) of their movement.

Even Though Our Salvation Is in the Lord

You know what's sad? The repetition of this earth
— Day and night — Heart and mind — Summer
And the winter — Fall and spring — Youth's joys, the age's
Late, old agony...

Quiet! What is that? Do you hear a tree
Creaking in the wind, a tall, old,
Stern oak? Do you think it falls?
It falls:

Man returns to the fall, one landscape among
This perpetual revolution of landscapes,
Token of our pride and death, in that

I thought I heard a siren song
In all of it.

Revelation

It isn't that I don't want philosophy —
It's that I begin to turn from it and to turn towards God;
It isn't that I don't want God,
It's that I begin to turn...

1. Towards Philosophy

The rational grows
Like a great beast or a ripe
Blossom, bud, the flower: seeds
Of fire, I
Who held the fire, spread
The flame (spread in me).

The rational ascends
Like a bird whose wings encompass
Space, the blue vault, globe
That hangs in space
And is and is not space.

The spirit and the flame
Merge and glare:
The pupil in the eye —
Who yearns to see, who yearns
To lift her veil, and gaze
At splendour
(Yearns to see beyond the statue
And the stone
In statue and in stone)

Instruct me, cries
The lover to his eyes;
The eyes are in a word,
The word is in a thought,
The thought in forms
Forms God, the thinker who perceives the thought
Behind the forms, and reforms
Thought, the god that perceives the words
Behind the speech;

And reality resolves in this way:
Words and speech,
The figure and the form,
Mathematics and belief
(And in belief,
And of belief)
And as and as not
One.

2. Towards God

The revealer veils me
In the fire's stone —
Fire, tablet of the seed
And seed the tablet
In the fire and before the fire
Lived and loved in Law.

Law speaks:
"The boom of thunder is your thunder,
The crease of lightning is your lightning,
Look on all you see, for behold!
It is yours."

Exegesis plucks
The world from the words
Like ripe cherry
Blossoms;
The mouth breathes
Golden fruit,
And give me water
Oh my lord!

I shall flow into you like a stream of air,
I shall inhabit your mind and the before-your-mind,
I shall feed off your flesh and breathe your breath
Like air. For I am heir to thought, its radiance.

But the divine book was closed,
And its words were lettered in a foreign tongue
That licked my vision as I licked a thumb
To turn the page.

Faith

We who see, who rise above the world,
Finally grasping it as globe,
When the cool arch of the land
Rises into the bridge of itself, not itself
For the paths and the mountains and the trees,
But itself in the long languor of the bath
Of blue and the vision of the clouds, feel
The outline of the world present not
As world but as world of the world,
Containing the world and yet,
And yet, yes, holding it back,
Diremption split in the divided veil of self,
Which veil itself unveils the world,
Lifting the veil of grace,
Keeping us with the face,
Ensconced in an eternal lord. Lord
Who shiver with mountains,
But are not the shivering, directing the process
Of growth and decay, yet neither the growth
Nor the decay, just atom's pulse,
Just the pulse of the process
Coming into vision of itself, really myself,
If I am myself, but since I am not, more,
Keep me in the credence of the path
That lays itself beyond the path
And in the globe of paths,
Keep me in the dream
Of consciousness, hold me in the fate
Of an unrolling chance. Because this is the world:
Light and books, the things I use, their use,
The words they continually spit and the people who spit them,
Redemption in the view of all these things, which view itself
Unfolds.

Correction

What is so bad about coffee,
Mr. Eliot? Oh I have rhapsodized coffee,
The Coffee Poems: pert, curt
And sweet.

"Took it as an epistemological principle did you
"— 'The Logic of the Bean', — 'Phenomenology of
"Caffeine'? You saw the world in a cup with cream."

Yes, I hymned coffee bold while you strummed
Of a celestial lady in the earthly
Garden, fountain, bones and sum
Of wordless Word
In simulacrum.

"Well coffee is of the earth,
"But 'our Father art in heaven,'"
Sir, coffee makes a heaven of the earth
With scents of earthy heaven,
Haven of the day, its sea
And vision of its sky,
Horizon and the measure
Of its horizontal girth,
Companion in the misery of slow hours
Hurtling by: that is coffee's art,
And coffee artless, this is where the cup
Of coffee stands — and so for you, to you,
Oh gift of God, I raise my hand.

To a Boy

Oh if I were in love with you and could give you
Sweet muslin and heady perfumes,
And taste the hair that croons
On lightly colored arms.

I would see you as a light, your charms
Inscribed upon my room, my bed
Filled with your body, hands
With your head; I would kiss you
Where your manhood bled
Its dribbling cream.

Dream, why do you stay from me?
Do you think that thinning hair and sharp words
Are too much, that I hide from you in books,
Between the lines of poems? You know I foam
At the mouth when I see you. Say,
"Stay!"

And we could make life beam.

Poio

To poem again, to know that the poem of my writing again
Is in the world, to measure the world with a poem
As a path by a step or a heart by its beat, but to know again
That I walk in step to the beat and that that beat calls to my heart
Thought and felt, and yet that this felt is again only dressing, only a dress.

Sublime,

The enumeration of these dead heros
Standing gravely like heirlooms or Prussians,
Their beards pointed down and their spears pointing up,
Peering queerly out of the cupboard.

Atoms and Void

I hear the buzz of a snow screen, the sound of disorder —
Knowing these things could be different.

Say you are adrift on the current and the headland awaits you
In theory, or you are surrounded by ideas which are precisely
Not the water hitting against the raft
Without fail
And the planks on which your weight
Seems to rest sloping or the brittle
Air and you would think, in shock,

How is that I am here?
And perhaps you soon won't be.