Mythologies

When the father enters the mother
(They are not yet father and mother)
Is it the rain that falls like spheres
To awaken the seed (heavenly mixture
Of water and fire woven into earth)?

Think: you fit a peg into a hole.
Why this talk of pegs and holes?
Because the opening, the absence
Must be filled: empty space
Is here embodied.

And who will believe that nonsense?
As if the penis were not
Just as empty or as if the folds
Of flowing skin didn't fill themselves.

But penetration: something pushes,
Something gives. It is an old design,
Held in symbols and rewoven
Into the timeless fabric of myth:
The active and the passive,
He who gives the ouns
And she who eats, and in the eating
Accomplishes the miracle of sinews
And of blood.

Enough! This is not
The transfiguration!
Haven't we clothed ourselves for too long
In the shadows of myth -- hiding, perhaps, from the gods:
The open air, the light, the earth? With you, my townspeople,
Everything must be ritual, as if we were still
The shaman with the beaver on his head,
Shaking his fists at the fire,
Surrounded by stars.

But aren't the stars enough? And the fire,
With all its parts? Let us think only in grids
And fit things into place: no persons and no birth, only
Rearrangements and the rearranging mind.
Anything else would be too little -- and too much.