Antediluvian Dreams

Antediluvian Dreams

I

There

In the emptiest house,

In four-walled solitude, under a white sky bright with brittle oblachki¹,

By the shadowstretch tangle of roof and rock and

Sun

I watch the horas move towards obras², omnes³, mega completas⁴.

And in the driest part of every day

:[Pure sere, brightest crystal of sandsmooth tongue]:

I breath in the hot Mojave, playing solitaire with sweatstained Bicycles

And dream of row upon row of empty rum bottles lined Euclidean

- an homage to Homer, sugar cane, and red-eyed impatience –

shems⁵beads gleaming through the glass,

slipping like slim threads of honey onto the retinas

of my thirsting eyes.

And I wait.

The day will come, a single day holding in first and final gleams

                                                                                              Bia⁶ extrema⁷:

In vast eddies by seas long far

The radiance will roil

- Toil, toil, moil and boil coruscant-

And sweat will dripcrash in

Irradiant curls outward: a god will grunt, he

Will rise from waves unCytherean

And work upon us.

And so invoked he will give us over, fleshed out

Earthydown

In his furious toil. I know

I must beware the crown of he

Who swore that nos amat⁸, nos amat, but

“kto drugomu pomoch’ mozhet? Kto yemu v dushu voidyot?⁹”

:his hands immense in servitio¹⁰ are

to the churngrind hours bound,

chained to his whisper after the storm,

to our obrushivaniyeh¹¹ sworn.

This is what he will say, our god,

When he comes.

And I pray every day for him to come, kull yom¹², kull yom,

On yom kippur, on MLK day, on every Sundaymondaytuesday of

Ordinary despair,

Wrapped in shemsbeads remembering:

^{Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani13}

Wrapped in shemsbeads remembering:

the uptorn reeds by the pond deracine,

the summer cukes and thorn-hid raspberries

[garnet-fleshed tart, across the crayfish-bottomed brook that idled cool beneath an

oak tree overcast],

the sweet-fleshed trout that came neat-packed, head and all,

from white beds of ice beside the oozing shrimp and shark:

in my mouth the flavor Lethe-wards turned,

away from ¹⁴ tyechyeniyeh¹⁵,

away from waves softly slapping on dark rocks,

and towards the tongue turned.

II

Yea,

In my solitude I cry, a worn voice fathered never by child,

And I remember,

I pull up the unculled roots,

I remember everything that shames me, makes me glad,

makes me turn away.

I seek out his coming

in the shadowstark of memory’s adumbrations:

εν αρχη ην ου λογος¹⁶

for in the blind place before sight

there was no room for knowledge or

emptiness; everything crowded and touched,

and light did not shine on my fingersformed inchoate to display

awayness;

I did not need answers.

III

An Icharus I am now;

For too long I bore the pomegranateplumpears of labor lightly,

And kept my eye upon the sun, thinking it was where I belonged.

But she is gone now;

Gone the pleasures too, gone the sure-rooted sense for where

My hopes could take me.

Gray-haired surely now she is, ¹⁷mellifluous still,

Her eyes the color always of chocolate most bitter and best,

And I must be to her the coldest flesh

- robbed of ardor, thoughtless, pure sere, darkest crystal

- to have loved and lost and then

To never have loved at all:

an ¹⁸petal plucked I pressed upon her once - not because

she was shimmering saffron and firm breasts, a beautiful face and moonlight walking –

but because we had given our own thoughts away

-emptynaked beside the pots and pans-

to bind a nefs¹⁹web ‘bout us,

and share the fresh-cast thought-felt world between us.

I have long since watched the wind that petal blow

Away

And long since said I didn’t give a shit

[and I don’t]

and long since seen that time is loneliness;

another woman’s moans and petals blown are sounds errantes²⁰:

zvook, zvook! Zvoochnii, poostiinnii zvook!²¹

Sight became

[With tastesmell and hearingheld]

A golemhold present without presence,

The emptiest ²². The sun shone down but I drove on.

Orchestras played, the ocean surged with teeming waves, and quiet the night sky with clouds and rain,

Mica gleaming in the cliffs, the dewdrop-wet grass – all! - were not the singers, but a song.

But aurum silentium est²³.

I could not watch her sleeping for an hour

Anymore;

The hoe and garden gloves were things to put away or buy anew when broken

And no longer the tools we held in sun in rain to

Tear the soil up and pull out weedroots, rough leather we

Removed

To see the sweat-bead blisters that grew into calluses. Her eyes I did not idle over;

Her coughs were loud, a nuisance,

And I no longer thought to ask on hearing of a sore throat

Or loneliness,

anger or

Her parent’s death,

“How do you feel?” with eyes, a glance, a hand or

Words;

I bought, I sold, I found and gave a thousand things

To see her suited

To give myself satisfaction,

To see us rise above the plain by counting all the bills we paid,

all the interest made, every ounce of oxygen less

the closer I got to the sun.

our love grew ethereal

till gone,

till the winter rains planted an icy beauty I wouldn’t have bought her if I could,

till spring thaws shook down the snow and I could no longer share with her the thawing smell

- and other beds entertained as much.

IV

Those were days of wisdom, when I began to see

Every fragile thing had its place, so closely scattered round,

and I had mine - but moiyoh myesto²⁴ was not near.

V

At last the walls came about me

And brought me silence sought,

and here,

-here! –

in the emptiest house in four-walled solitude,

I wait and remember, wait and watch:

The god will come,

He will tear this world down,

This ²⁵and-bone stage where I

cannot love the dandelion

for its petal or its stem, but must see it for a yellow blindness

Standing in my way.

He will come and when asunder torn

By his hands around my neck

I am made rapturous as can no drugorGodknell ring,

Together then [or single but entire] we will at last

gliding ride on seraphim wings into

the vaulting azured hollow.

1 “Clouds” in Russian

2 “Works,” “Labors,” “Toils,” or “Volumes,” etc, in Spanish

3 “Everyone” in Latin

4 “Complete,” “Total,” or “Completed” in Spanish

5 “Sun” in Arabic

6 “Violence” or “Force” in Attic Greek. Pronounced “Bee-ah.”

7 “Final,” “Utmost,” “Last” or “Death” in Latin

8 “he loves us” in Latin

9 “Who can help another? Who can enter into his soul?” – from “The Eternal Relic” by Ivan Turgenev. In the

original Russian.

10 “in servitude” or “in bondage” in Latin

11 “Collapse” or, more loosely, “destruction” in Russian

12 “Every day” in Arabic

13 The Greek transliteration of the Aramaic “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”, which Jesus cries out from the cross in Mark 15:34; the words are the opening lines of Psalm 22. Pronounced “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.”

14 “The beginning” in Koine and Attic Greek. Pronounced “Hey Arkhey”

15 “Flow” or “Flowing” in Russian

16 “In the beginning there was no word/reason/logic/story” in Attic/Koine Greek. Pron. “En Arkhey eyn ooh logos”

17 “Honey-scented” in Attic/Homeric Greek. Pron. “Melip-na-ey”

18 “Hope,” “Expectation,” and/or “Anxious thought about the future” in Attic Greek. Pron. “elpiis”

19 “Soul,” “Self” and/or “same” in Arabic.

20 “Wandering” and/or “erring” in Latin. Pron. “eh-ron-tays”

21 The entire line means, in Russian, “Sound! Sound! Sonorous, empty sound”

22 “Act” and/or “deed” in Attic Greek. Pronounced “air-gone”

23 “Gold is silence” in Latin. Pronounced “ow-rum sih-lent-ii-um est”

24 “My place” in Russian

25 “Flesh” in Attic Greek