To make old prose in modern rhyme more sweet—Keats
The wide Virgin’s eyes and glossy hair the grape leaves filligreed in oaken beam—
Thus ledgered conjugations took on body
Shouted out a psalmody from a corpse of nones and verspers
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Nave and sanctuary were thus graced
But statuary also filled a niche within the mind conveying depth and heft to a contingency—
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Pure presence distilled from Narcissus… Goldmund, cured of blindness, set out to wander, shiver, assignate, witness Earthly death, detect the Earth-mother in every stalk of the field know the world in clayey fecundity its convulsions and resilience
an empire growing from a cloister cell an epic spun from an iota
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And can’t a thought—most waifish of essences— take on the green foliage of abandon? An unbreathed wish enter the hot fields of desire?☨ ☨ ☨
Who among us is so small dimensioned as to lack a second nature that ventures windward into whatever storm it must?
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Narcissus’s heart, given universal compass, thus gathered the world in its mouth and hands☨ ☨ ☨
The errant quests of Goldmund are wisps scarcely recalled insubstantial as cascading verses, as a kiss in fleeing mists
As for Narcissus, he persists He clasps these fine-traced lines to his capacious mind a sacrament to love a benediction throughout the age
This poem was published in Dumbo Press on March 3, 2024.
Andy Oram
January 15, 2024