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.