Thursday, September 13, 2018

‘Bringer’


.
.
At first it seemed an awfully awkward sobriquet: his retinue
said he’d requested them to call him ‘Bringer.’ He specialized
in bringing you to brinks. He collected hangers-on – coaxing
in them the perspective that by hanging on and in they could
inspect whatever next and necessary dawn they’d need:
and they would always need another one of those. The brink
they brought me to was not a rift between the night and day,
.
or poetry and prose: the lift they taught was what it meant
to generate a breathing thought. Only then might proverbs once
again begin to reign, only then could Word approach the Flesh
to gird the cosmos with its latticed diction, syntax, joined ecstatic
differences: the gone, the here, the old, the new, now steamed
into a life-begetting stew, to swallow which would be what
a Communion symbolized, and was:  the sole soul food –
.
the stealth and wealth of soul, the art the heart imparted. I’ve
no idea, of course, if this is what they had intended to convey.
All I can say is by the time I put my pen away, they had departed.
I nearly said summarily. Assonant with verily. Capricious fizz,
this tic, this busy and delicious specious-seeming rhetoric.
Elegance is awkward. Is that what meaning is? An irrepressible
reflex, a spill of speech? Is that what they had come to teach?
.
.
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