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Catalonia
The whistle trilled and the drum was lightly tapped.
Heard by he who penned the first line,
The digger of the foundation,
The layer of the cornerstone.
Where the nativity welcomes the eye
And the angular passion assaults the soul,
The power of the shrieking reed reverberates
Across the Catalonian air
And carries a prayer for the nations.
No Loss of Discernment
I hold a secret, a solitude of my being,
Which God alone can penetrate and understand.
Being apart from the mass of other men,
Leaves me able to love others as I ought.
I am aware that false solitude is self-centred.
And no longer shrink from the good things in life
Or other lives, because I need not possess them.
My soul is drawn towards the desert,
But I no longer object to life in the city.
I will not travel far unless I leave my words behind,
For silence is the destination.
If I poured my life out in useless words,
There’d be nothing to hear from the depth of my heart.
Loving God leads me to love the silence,
For there will be no loss of discernment.
I’ll avoid chatter, and not fear life as if it were death,
For silence makes death a servant and friend.
As the eloquence of death and human poverty
Confront the riches of divine mercy,
I discern the risen Lord and his gift of life
in the depth of my soul.
Maundy
…he now showed them the full extent of his love. (John 13:1)
The full extent of your love?
This room, this supper,
This washing of feet?
It is so little –
Yet it is everything.
Why me Lord? Why now?
What is expected of me?
Can I receive so much
And give nothing back?
Gethsmane
Are you still sleeping and resting? Enough! (Mark 14:41)
I’m sorry.
I’m so tired.
You’re angry with me.
Please don’t be like that.
Don’t be so hurtful.
This is not like you.
- Forgive me.
Un Livre
Head tail and fore-edge turn as one cover
On a life-canto and, like church bells in
Thunder the familiar becomes strange.
The darkness I confront alone rings out
As a breaking wave on the shore that lays
Itself across the sands for the beach to
Inspect, at the turning point, before it
Scurries back to the deep. The sea petals
Opened and you rose erect to release
The bird, wings on fire, screaming as it fell
Into the sea. It was a brief exchange
Of souls. Lips kissed the dahlia shadow,
Yet drew back from the squeezed head of black seeds.
Tout au monde existe pour aboutir à un livre.
The mystery the grace and all the universe.
Love and False Redemption.
In the Scala by John Climacus, the twenty third step is
on mad pride and unclean and unmentionable thoughts.
Climbing, ever nearer, reaching step twenty three,
My lost and lonely way did wind and curl.
I was searching for her who would save me,
For a sight of the Golden Girl.
My eyes fell upon a field of wheat, so pliant before the wind.
But my face felt the breeze as a brutal caress
And as I started to undress
I thought of all the times I’d sinned.
I fell into that golden sea
And rolled and crushed those ripened ears.
My madness bare for all to see,
I dismissed all the usual fears.
Scratched and reddened by the ripened wheat
I turned to face the vale below.
Winnowed in the wind and rising to my feet,
I screamed out loud - my Golden Girl, my Golden Girl,
Only you will know.
My scream was a kestrel released to the sky.
It hung, an aural cross on high,
Symbolic of my own despair,
Echoing across the vale,
Carried to the garden where
Each scream was felt as a driven nail
By the Golden Girl.
She cut my words down from the cross
And laid them on the ground.
She kissed each one so tenderly and, without a sound,
She organised them patiently, caressing them so gently
That the meaning rose for all to see,
My Golden Girl, My Golden Girl, I’m found.
I thought I was saved
By the Golden Girl, in pride before the fall.
But I was enslaved
By her mocking eyes and I was in her thrall.
Subjected to her flying flail,
My pleas echoed across the vale,
My pleas rang out to no avail,
And she brushed me off,
My Golden Girl, my Golden Madonna.
Like a husk in the scattered chaff,
I was blown off the Scala.
And Once Was Enough.
Piso looking out o’re the azure sea,
Thinking, thinking, never ever easy.
Coming up behind him, a blackening sky,
Thinking, thinking - why?
(The Papyrus Cantos IV).
The Tragedies beyond the thirty eight,
papyrus dust blowing about Piso’s
seaside villa, where the pyroclastic
surge rushed to meet the lapping azure sea,
were spoken in the amphitheatre once,
heard once upon a time then lost to us.
And once was enough to be devoured by
the all-consuming core that around itself
accretes the flesh of the ripening apple,
which the sly pollinator decreed to be
the nourishing fruit of the rational soul.
The words inside the sweet and swelling fruit
were no more dead than the red blood of
the living flesh, considered apart. I was
the core linked to umbilics on the surface,
the words, our sins, the dead, the gods, the good.
As sunlight first broke through the swirling dust
and as the growling, trembling giant did shake
with Herculean might the living petrified,
obliquely sunlit dust of the spoken word
was eaten and preserved, the dead sustaining.
As blood and flesh became one, the apple
ripened to a hardened tuff and the core
was incorruptible and immortal.
Without and Within
Attainment of the complex vision, ‘does not imply any radical change in human nature. It only implies a liberation of a force that already exists, of the force in the human soul that is centrifugal, or outflowing, as opposed to the force that is centripetal, or indrawing. Such a force has always been active in the lives of individuals. It only remains to liberate that force until it reaches the general consciousness of the race, to make such a reconstruction of human society not only ideal, but actual and effective’.
(John Cowper Powys, The Complex Vision, p.xix.)
There is the astrobleme, there was the impact
from the limitless outside, across the slit
or crevice or crack in the desolate mountain mass.
Twirling around the magma chamber,
fictitious force that had to follow
the true path, the straight path that sheers off.
Desire for centrifugal freedom meant
that fusion would be seen as repression
and that made Aquinas the great repressor.
It wasn’t a birth from the womb maternal,
the paternal and placental realms,
nor a re-birth with umbilical cord.
Rather an overflowing, an overrunning,
from the holomoving rhizome not the root,
without a sign of preformation.
Then a spiraling ascent
from potential to potential,
rising, always actual.
Then a fleeing from the centre,
from the home to the edge,
across the plates of Avalonia.
Overflowing to fill the slits
and crevices and cracks,
the scars and quarries.
Spilling into the streets and houses,
factories and tram tracks,
railway tracks and wharves,
fountains and water troughs.
There the impact, there the release.
There from without, there from within.
Pondering Upon the Brazen Head Whilst Tending the Dahlias.
Entering by a flying gate,
to be led up the garden path
between the dahlias (driven by the light bearer,
never free) and thought eidola,
past loves, parents’ health, chance friendships, hopes.
Nodule from a Martian’s back,
termite, not beatifying for pleasure.
The graffiti always returns - where from?
If energeia-akinesis - what of God?
If entelecheia - what of us?
What if that thing inside the head
came out, features indistinguishable
as a widespread landscape from on high?
It would burst the curtilage, seeking the true path.
The branches move soughingly in the darkness.
Above, the sunlit hilltop high.
Below, the palindromic abyss,
the force propelling to phosphorescent
crimson from a dormant tuber.
I Charged At My Foe.
(Inspired by The Brazen Head.)
I charged at my foe,
holding my spear aloft.
Whence came the spear?
Like a shaft of light from Aldebaran,
seven to eight cellular sloughings
ago, it broke the waters as
a wave, incurving, insatiable, desperately
craving nourishment, possessed
of the swallowing mouth of a hungry fish.
It left uplifted eyeballs,
like a frog with its chin on a lily leaf,
searching the empyrean for thunder.
Pushing my spear into the tyrant’s ear,
I whispered - "all I crave is an
unembarrassed silence".
Twisting the spear, my scream flew out
into the night, like a wild bird
whose wings were on fire -
"This is me! This is me! This is me!
Deep down lay the tablet.
Deep down lay the tablet,
Limpet upon inscription,
"In sooth I hate all gods",
Barnacle upon limpet.
Whence came the discovery?
Not from the tablet,
Nor from the rough-hewn rock,
Never from the rock face.
With each layer I chipped away,
I defied Heraclitus,
Like garden pond water,
The same river twice and more,
Circulates through a pump.
Each time it is cleansed,
But progresses no further,
Like the winds of the world
Return to pass through
The most ancient of fissures,
In the churchyard yew.
Man trumped God
As the engine sheds enclosed
The cathedrals he built.
Now I see through Man
With the lucidity of one
Who returns, again and again,
To the rock.
The Unchallenged Pope.
Fleeing Clough’s village is not
The path of the particular persons.
They stay in the Italianate garden.
Yet to be the sun around which I turn,
Does that not open me to
Copernican critique?
But there is no-one ahead this time.
I am forever the unchallenged Pope
And cardinals benign.
Let me take you down to a red door
In the shadow of a bindweed bank,
A home organic with community,
Inhabited by willing communards,
A house on a hill, apart from the village,
First sensation of emergent ownness,
Though weak and ill defined and undistilled.
Smollet and the genius of Trier
Smashed the staring icons of the spirit,
The spooks, they smashed them all with fear and glee,
Leading me to see, forcing me to see
The power of community and to
Deny community in later life.
No, this time there is no-one ahead,
None but the congregation of the dead.
Down there in the village they made me.
I am of them and they hold me captive,
But do they know? They cannot understand.
Up here on the heights looking down, I feel
Apart, aloof, climbing the slope of the ridge.
Above the belt of the larch and the spruce,
Where the heather and whinberry leaves shudder,
Upon the ridge, is the bardic god
Of solitude holding his staff aloft,
As the anti-man. "Follow your conscience",
He little more than whispers to my
Head bowed knelt deference. "Follow your
Conscience." It’s is not mine to follow.
"Follow your conscience, follow your conscience",
But I can’t distinguish it from the rest,
This together knowledge, thing of contempt,
A plaything of the invisible hand.
I bow low before you, aged eagle.
I am your slave and I am your object.
You are subject, demand self-sacrifice.
I will not reflect, but conform.
Yet is facing the gap, the suffering,
The angst, in conscious adjustment, not freedom?
Is it not here that I see in you
The substance of me?
Glory to man in the highest,
For man is the master of things.
Glory to man in the highest
Is the song the red rebel sings.
Hertha, before you I make my address,
Cleansed, the tabula rasa,
But of infinite regress.
I’ve come to the end of the guiding thread,
Only to confront the community of the dead.
Knaptoft.
I turned back and there it was,
The well bucket, dragged across the pit of my stomach.
Please, I said, please don’t tauten the rope.
You’re leaving me.
Come back, come back.
Found, a short distance down a once frequented lane,
To nowhere now, but lives and tears then,
The stones where once men grovelled for life,
Facing steel and prayed for life
Facing the fiercer edge of eternity.
Is this the well bucket, lowered again
That I might connect with the searcher,
The delver, the hunter,
The diviner, the fisher?
The rope tautens
Touching the stones here
Is touching the wall of the well,
The dark, dank, dripping well.
Above the little circle of light, far away.
It is too slippery a climb,
To even contemplate a life in the light.
I’m resigned to that dot,
That imperceptible dot
That those frightened and hunted
And retreating men saw too,
As the rope tautened.
You’re leaving me.
Come back, come back.
John Dunn.
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