Baptismal Phosphorescences

for John Tipton

 

It may be said that all theological elaborations, insofar as they are allowed
to become pictorial, are fantasy.

ARTHUR GREEN, A Guide to the Zohar

 

Here is a dream of power, had seventeen years ago. A dream
   of power, as my teacher once told me, is a crossroads,
a Sphinx-node where a decision—funneled
                        through psychic oracle                  is made.
                 In the backyard of the house I grew up in, a space
not insignificant, whose size is not memory's, I stand
    in a silence like the ratchet-hisses of cicadas, but a sonic without
                esses, without that sound but even so
                   pleromatic, ebullient with noiselessness, & in a green
               light. A late, eighth-month light, spent
                   of fecundity but blared still with life.                   I stand there
          at the edge of the yard. Watching.

My whole family & those friends closest to me are all flying through
   the air in the yard. The motion
                                          of their flight
                    plays with gravity. Stretched out
they luge headfirst through the airy causeways, banking
  on tethered curves they pull to the tops of, lengthened onto the perihelia
of centripetal crescents that shape the afternoon memoriam. Then, into the sky
               they ease, hover. Sporting in flight.

At the time of this dream, this vision could not help me over my feelings of disorientation. I lived                        
     as if under constant inner pressure. So familiar /
        familial. Canny . My need
      to join the flyers is intense, a pulsation of love throbbing
         from my carotids—: I lean into the flumed light expecting
                             uplift. None
                                comes. Everyone looking at me. Their glazed-
                        over, hebetudinous stares.

         A sudden feeling as if dived down into a deep narcosis. Carid.
The sense of things alters. Terribly. They have eaten something to
    let them fly, I realize. Religion. Some horrifying morsel of it.
                         John, you are a flyer, telling me something, a confession
                           of fuzz, in wonderment. Your words,
                                             lost to me,
                                         not these:

          Behold the love the Father has given us. The world doesn't know us, because
             it didn't know him. Beloved.
           We are the Sons of God—& it's unknown what we are becoming. But when he comes
              we know we shall be like him because we will know him. 1 john 3:12

These days, in order to seize hold of my fantasies, I must imagine
   a steep descent. I've even imagined trying to get to the very bottom—:
       once, nearly a thousand feet down; another time,
         to the edge of a cosmic                   abyss.

      I feel myself now suspended in the midst
of a vast depthless field. John, I
                    can accept everyone's presence
       in this dream but yours, which turns the scene intolerable. Having
         mentored me into an individual light, you cannot be home
                   in this collective inhabitation of the spirit.

                                              There is a key
                                     I refuse
                                                to turn. The dream
                 was a precognition of poetry, friendship's platinum
synonym, its Ovidian, mysterious course. Its metamorphosis from one to the other. Yours & mine. At the time,
seventeen years ago, I felt the dream a blind soothsayer's palpations,
         touching for the Braille of its meaning, a prescience
      that all things, even friends are tugged
               under the life-tide.                                  Today, its meaning

is less clear, mellowed considerably, less alarming—
       but uncanny nevertheless:                   love
                   is an otherness whose fields
we stand at the edges of, interpreting its aerialists' motions in merged
         fear & anticipation. Coming & going, dwelling where it wills,
             feral or human, shifting bodies, the Spiritus
                       keeps on living. It hisses—insect-intense—
                  nihil interit . That nothing dies.

All my work is a record of transformations.

 

 

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