Summa

We can compose dainty madrigals or offer airs

            as those in ancient times for viola da gamba

            of predictable and prescribed order

            with fixed measures and baroque ornaments,

            that, yet if sounded every morning of every day of our lives,

            each time would sear the flesh and char the bones,

            each time consuming us with unquenchable molten needs.

 

We chase melodies who, like sprites,

            dart as manic watermelon seeds,

                      escaping from, and driven by,

                      the clumsy thumbs-as-fingers pinching of our logic.

            They chant, whisper, and hide in the delirium within us,

            as untouchable as mirages, as reasoned as whims,

            as necessary as knives, — and much truer than our philosophies.

            They frolic as we pursue, nuzzle us as we sleep,

            and are always just beyond our clutch.

                         

We fall, ravaged by a holy need, fully empty into silence,

            into the tabernacle in which the name of God may not be spoken nor thought of.

            It is then that the world demands new ways that it be known. By its force,

            we, the unsaintly, have unwilled visions of that never before seen

                                 and the unsought-for hearing of songs not yet sung. 

           The world pierces us relentlessly and so lovingly.  We bleed

           brightly by noon and then in nights and in dreams from fever or from unrepentant hope

                                —even until the unholiest of days. And then to the latter days.

Our prophecies are the cadences of myth.  Our anthems, organ tones of symbol.

Our sacrament is pain oracular, shared among the ungodly and the good.

                                                

We walk barefoot in the snow, taste colors, and hear the coming of dawn.

           We ask the frog of the moon and the lilies of the sun.

           We prise out the smallest boxes hidden within the Chinese puzzle

           and invoke the true, magical, and secret nomina of things and purposes.

           We trap time, fold it, rewrap it, and package it in spices.

           In the high merry of summer, we honor thickets and thorns, and the storms to come.

           And we tell of the blood of the Faithful shed by the Faithful. We weep. 

           

And so we leap, wounded gazelles before lions, to sing of the terrifying beauty.