Salvations
A thin man, sinewy, not tall; his face
so craggy ageless as an old oak tree.
Already ancient when he took his place
in yon medieval cloister o’er the sea —
on crooked layered lichen-splashéd cliff
above calm steel-blue, in loughs foaming white,
cold northern sea — where peacefully he’s lived
these thousand secret years out of mind though oft in sight.
A druid: seer, priest, judge; well versed
in ancient arts — forgotten now; by science, faith, and law all cursed.
What magic — now banished, obsolete — play
has him so well so long in plain view hid?
Don’t know. But mornings, while his brother’s pray,
he opes stone walls and ups stairs curving amid
the starry vacuum of space into black hole door
out which not light nor thought nor soul may pour.
How does he come and go where nothing can?
Don’t know. But within this impossible place,
a salvation machine floats, not just stands.
A machine built of thought where man comes face
to face with God outside timespace. Yet God’s
no face, but only Purest Love divine
that shines beyond our human piecemeal thought —
a Light past feeling body and thinking mind.
A salvation machine is layered because
Salvation’s layered. The machine does what it does
‘fore time and space; before what’s hoped or feared;
‘fore will of man or God; ‘fore chance; before the wyrd.
A self’s an overlapping collection
of lies — evolving, and more near or far
the Truth. The wiser know that perfection
of knowledge or ignorance are both a bar
too high for mortal reach. To hold the fancy’s flights
of self and other aloft whilst aware
of how they do and don’t reflect the Light:
This wisdom practice will salvation bear:
Salvation in layers like a jigsaw onion
Salvation through every myth and perversion
of the one Light that Eden saw play,
of the Real ‘neath twists of everywhichway.
All day into each night he plies the gears
and levers, threading from his seat in formless giving joy
through fateful warps and chancey woofs to guide all us children here —
felt-stories of self and other, of nation, tribe and town: all this noise
about how I’m this or that, my allegiance and/or boundaries lie here or there –.
I cannot say if his work touches our world or if he’s spun another one
from ghostly dreams he’s gathered as shells all glittering in the summer sun.
Who shall be saved? What spared the fire
that burns every feeling, thought or deed
not born in through and for the Love that never tires?
I wanted too to help, to let the evil bleed
away. I too wished to find a poetry
to heal our souls and the structures that we
both operate and seem sometimes to be.
But waxen wings and all I tumble down
to slow blue sea. I saw you and conceived
disdain: “Such little people”, I said and with a frown.
So very small of art and thought I believed
you to be. But now, my body torn and heart washing up
on the pebbly shore — my mind catching and tossing up
the sunlit edges of tilting waves —
I think I’d wheeled ’round to gore
a wounded, tusk-foaming, gloss-eyed boar.
Seems a shame, to die violent, enraged.
A vengeful death; a low rebirth.
A hateful charge burns up much worth.
Everyone’s flimsy, equally zero and nil.
But caverns broken by the Love past will
and won’t, past is and not: they ope
upon a vista bright and infinite in scope.
Ah well, let it ride, our druid was cast out
for telling his fellow lawgivers that Law
forbade the wicker man, ignored any pleas and shouts
they might heap up on burning human flesh and all
such false and erring mystical buffoonery.
But now he hides in the gear-works of a refined sorcery
and all he touches blossoms like roses in springtime,
as age upon he forgets his life, recalling only something sublime —
some little thing; I know not what; I know only that it somehow twinkles in his still-young eyes;
and that every morning he yet does rise and to his work he yet flies, with no demands and no earthbound or heaven-found why, our salvation yet — best he only ever can he tries and tries — for to ply.
Author: Dr. Humphrey Dumphrey
Production Crew: Our Bartleby and Our Amble
Copyright: Andrew M. Watson
Lesson: We give up; we are tired; when our mother, the sea nymph Thetis, dipped us into the sea — that every spot of what we were that felt old Ocean’s cold salty kiss all mortal wounds would on-ever outrun –, she held us by our infant ankles, and that is why a lucky shot by a third-string archer has laid us out upon the dusty killing fields of ancient wind-swept Troy.