Canticle on the Pentarchy
XXXV
So they gave him all the strange gods they had,
And the earrings which were in their ears:
And he buried them under the turpentine tree,
That is behind the city of Sichem.
Water was teeming along flat stretches of plains intermittent
While I spent some hours in sober and plaintive reflection
Mulling on what I was asked by the rabbi, for much as commitment,
That is, decision, is governed by reason, in human election
Little is certain, and reason depends on the hands of his cheered wife,
Sense, to detect and present him with what so inhabits his vicinage,
Though as the psychic construction of man is His glorious Image,
God may so speak to us thus, so we might well chariot-steer life
Twixt all our passions, a road from a Babylon towards perfection,
Rain as it might on the flood-plain peaks of our copula-being,
Shaping in mud flesh joined to our spirit, a small introspection:
Water was teeming, and wetting the earth; but in line of my seeing
Only the hazy horizon of termagent wilds was far-seen,
Marshes unlit and beyond words, marshes occult and bewitching,
Marshes of cradles and spirits and satyrs all caught in a star-beam
Pouring on vinegared rips in the wet earth’s ventricle-stitching,
Teetered upon by the tamarisks, majestied mastics, the almonds in blossom,
Date palms flushed in their season, and terebinths poison to handle,
Pears and delicious apples untainted by apples-of-Sodom,
Ebony pergolas, bushes of box-thorns catching the sandal,
Flora all beating the green blood Earth weeps forth inexactly
Meeting the pleasure of rain as the rise of a heavenly fire
Joins in the center of heaven; and culturing matter-of-factly,
Silent the host drinks deep in the wine by their roots they acquire,
Spreading their branches as dancers their drapes in the light of a fresh sun,
Blossoming blesst by the Most High, cooling its mother, the wood-earth,
Spreading their leaves, and in season we watch its botanical flesh run
Green with the promise of spring, indication of fruit and its good worth,
While the romance of wintry decline is remanded abatement
Till it is time for its season again, and beasts in accordance
Run to their burrows and burst from their dens, a peculiar statement
Oft but repeated again, and again, all with equal importance;
This I inquire: but why? and I speculate walking the same sands
Walked by my fathers, my blood remembering what in his members
Abram considered, and though in his loins I, unable to shake hands,
Fight with a sword or discern which one of his fellow defenders
Merited loyalty, even so each of his children were witness
To’rd the events in the story the rabbi intended on sharing,
Making complicit our hands, for all ill or beneficent fitness,
Whether our father was cunning or simple, or fearful or daring
This is our father, our bones, and his journey at once incremental
Measured a traveler’s share by the way of the river and desert
Hundreds of miles between him and Canaan, and this is essential,
Such an expense of his resources, danger and perilous effort
Only could happen by prompting of mentally certain communion,
Not by his reason alone, but by faith, and a faith undefiled
Neither by conscience or law, for Haran is a distant reunion
Gathering Abram and Lot And Terah; curiosity riled,
What could he hear with the certainty, even in reason’s encoding,
Whispers from somewhere, the trickle of thoughts are consistently streaming
Down from a lightless and spiritual source, and by reason’s foreboding
Much of experience glosses with purpose, the oil of meaning,
Fitting in narratives sunk in the mire of what we are willing,
Want to believe, as the mires of Babylon drink from the dry land
Oceans of water from heaven and always without overfilling,
Minds are the same, or the intellect rather whose treacherous tight hand
Guides its confusion, and swishing on cold marsh gusts shall inhabit
Courier birds and their roost, and the moors shall give rest to the ibis
Spreading a mystical wing, and the rushes the whimsical rabbit,
Fearing the taunt of the wolf in the reeds more golden than Midas
Flushed in the cat-tail concourses, sung to by warblers and hood-crows
Staying unseen in the interstice rivers of interstitched courses
Ruled from a palace of gods: yea, man’s reed-houses and wood-rows,
Man with his boats and his swords and his hoes and his carts and his horses
Modifying natural elements, clay in his hands for their shaping,
Which these things, unaware, serve well to the artifact-maker,
Guiding their form to his liking: he takes from the tamarisk’s draping
Honeyd’w sweet, and from oxen their strength to repurpose his acre,
Even the mighty behemoth its life, to its final extinction,
Barely remembered, its heft loins sourcing incredible power
Greater than elephants, first of the works of the heaven’s distinction,
Even the land; but it worked to itself to no ultimate hour,
Working with panting exertion in dragging a pyramid’s dense block
Over the miles of desert, no longer recalled but in cold glyphs
Etched in the tombs of the dead man struck from the ever-immense rock
Filling the foot-trod planes for his pyramids, heavenly-stoled cliffs
Calling the world to acknowledge him; this was the tower of Babel,
Sacrificed many a monster and male live-stock and marine fish
Toward a temple or tomb with its point remystified rattle,
Equally dead and deserted, and equally flagrant and fiendish,
Only in min’ature, rising alike to a finger defiant
Pointing to God as a foul accusation: Thou madest me wrongly,
Now I am coming to make me myself in Thy furnaces giant
Spinning my form on the pottery bench new, lovingly, strongly;
This was the sin of our kind, I believe, but the words of the teacher
Fell to me silent, and thus I could not hear what he was saying,
What he intended in sharing his tale, save what as a creature
Man can discern from the voice of the Lord in his story’s portraying,
Much as I ought to defer to the rabbi his legend’ry forging
Given his status as teacher, I dredge nonetheless in mentation
Reason’ble affects, forsooth can I bicker with thinking’s disgorging?
Might I be able to righteously war with ratiocination?
Nay, for the womb of all sin is in this disobedience double,
Wanting and ignorance; whereas a desert is kind of a haven
Which can instruct on belaying the body by sleeping on stubble,
Drinking no water for temperance’ sake, supped only by raven,
Hedged on the sides by the wings of the patient primordial marshes,
Flanking the deserts as opposite, whereas Edenic-returning
Implicates wet-lands, those resembl’ng the Babylon marches,
Deserts are better depictions of now, for our paradise-spurning
Earns us the arid, the swamp in embrace of the albatross’ wing-span
Leads us to false home-bound on its shoal wet, iron-encrusting;
Yea, for the promise of best is the want of the better, for things can,
When they are bad, be accepted if man can remain him entrusting
That he is bound to the sensory only, and this is the power,
Even the need, of the parable; wherefore the rabbi’s concoction
Meant for his traveling synagogue more than a tale of a tower,
Rather a humoring spectacle reasoning Abram’s adoption;
Wherefore his tragic political yarn, if a tad unenticing,
Cleaved to my mind all the same, and so when we arrived in Damascus
Where we retired from wagon, the lot had deemed it sufficing
That they could later embark on the river, for this was the fastest,
Though I decided with rabbi to quest in pedestrian motion
Onward with only us two; and by evening, the terebinths swaying
Seemed to me sentries on guard on a swale to the Indian Ocean
Which could admit us by natural witness of jackals in baying,
Saying we also were like them, destined to meet with the prefect,
None were to harry us there; and so being, the terebinth sentry,
Duly convinced, disimposed; and siroccos inspected for defect,
Adders were laid at our feet, and the antelopes bade us for entry,
Prompting the rabbi to say, I was sharing a parable fairly
Even embellished on Abram whose virtue is visible starkly
Though he is moreso mysterious than angels to those of us rarely
Thinking the goodness of humans illusive or seen by us darkly,
Hearing the law of our Lord in contemplative circuiting candid,
That he was first to be faithful from Noah and those he had trusted
Well to be brought on his barque; the transition from tribals disbanded
Toward the founding of empires sharpening weaponry rusted,
That is, the learnings of angels unfit for our mortal employment
Given to women they rapt from us — wherefore departs from their ladder
Envy of human begetting, beyond mere carnal enjoyment:
Man’s reproduction is heavenly image in physical matter;
Abram our father in faith had foregone this physical pleasure
Seeking the truer begetting, the motion of reason from being,
Rising from reason to being and wanting to numinous measure,
Faithful before He had promised him, walking before he was seeing,
Even in Babel, he walked by a law he had limited light on,
Only obeying the law by concomitant reason and regress,
Knowing the tower was evil to make, but to kindred with sight gone . . .
Need thee of me to declare to thee there was no redress?
Maybe in time he expected to break stiff necks by his preaching
Thinking his rational words were enough to ignite it in others,
Though in the lawless the truth is antique, he could not by beseeching
Stagger the heart of a king, and so thus he, the one of his brothers
Capable therewith in leaving his father, departed for Canaan,
Land of iniquities rare, for the sum of the sins was sufficient
Even for miser’ble earth to, in terms understood by a laym’n,
Spit them out, and our father had nothing of courage deficient
That he sojourned in their territ’ry well to the banks of the Nile
Seeing their wickedness, knowing it not; and his godly vocation
Took him to rival the kings of the land and to war for a while,
Censure his flesh and at last draw blade in secluded location
Ready to grant primogenitured evil, the angel restraining;
Wherefore the story? for what could the man know, that with conviction
Abraham spurned his allotment of God by a prayer obtaining,
Turning to something invisible instead? was it holiest diction,
Heard by the ear? or a firm resolution by rational method?
Maybe implanting of knowledge, or sealed in a spirit-conveyed sign?
What did thou hearest, my son, that stirred in thee moments intrepid
Bringing thee even to great Masada as thy blade and the day shined
Wishing for something of spirit’al vengeance? before I could answer,
This he related, Thy deeds are as chattering birds, they are well-heard,
Reckoning thee to be strong as an ox and as quick as a panther,
Vengeful and snubbed nonetheless, and wherever thou chos’t to be sheltered
Later thou camest to battle the zealots, I heard, in their fortress,
Though thou wert not as it were given to victory; after escaping
Thou hadst determined for Babylon, travelling pace of a tortoise
Toward the marshes primeval, but wherefore thy purpose in shaping
Such for thy destiny? What am I bid to respond? for the preacher,
Given his office, is one to whom we bid or inquire,
Which is the reason the Lord is unjudged in the eyes of a creature;
That I was weary of questions, I yawn and pretend to retire,
Knowing an obvious pretense has dignity greater than trying,
Partially-hearted, to justify where I have taken my pall bones,
Lest I defend an iniquity, even resorting to lying;
Thus at our stay on the riverb’nk clay intermingled with small stones,
Little was said but occasional mention of practical pert’nence
(Temper’ture leads as we know to all speech by a small escalation)
Toward a properly deep conversation, but give I no furth’rance,
Giving a gruff groan, knowing I thus quelled dusk convocation,
Wishing to rest from my troubles a while without imposition
Though as the night was prepared by the darkening skies I relented
Once it was dark, the decision I took as no man of concision,
Started to speak on the matter he chose as I hoarsely lamented,
Only can good be distorted and only the sacred defiled;
Hear, o thou child of child, I admit of it polish and fitness
Trusting for now in our God who is gathering men from the wilds:
Angels and couldn’t perceive Him, and Isaac was never a witness
Abraham heard Him in something besides speech, and hearing divine Word,
Walked in our sorrow, our curse is to wander, eternally sighing,
Scattering, fueling a flame, by my self-laid snares or by thine sword —
Call us all fools, but no charlatan men; then was the rabbi replying,
Sayest it now with conviction, thou must, for thou heardest no speaking,
Ever, from God, for thou knowest no shekel of good inspiration,
Only the whisper of reason beguiling thy man as a leaking,
Ludicrous passage of passions, and even so, sans validation,
What hath thou done with the oracles given to thee but embezzle,
Twisting to tusked turbulation a gift from our Lord for a right soul?
This I replied, all us men on our rung on the ladder of Bethel
Hold and are licking of fiery reason in hand as we might hold:
Even myself, as I humbly bestrode in the latest of summers
That in the riddle I wish to explain, as is pure, undefiled,
Listen with care for the Most High, pouring His Spirit of wonders,
Making us images sacred, becoming by virtues His child,
Only in spirit was goodness in me, and diminutive, rootless,
Hare in a prison, a soul in his flesh — cold-pressed acclimation,
Nay, I cannot speak — God by His infinite mercy and goodness
Makes it so even a killer can work out God’s meditation,
Purified through good penance and aided by copious divine grace
Proffered by rites of the Hebrews, His portion and permanent searchlight;
Thus is the word of the rabbi: But thou reckonest not as he migrates,
Jacob disperses; forgiveness by favor and not by a birthright
Fairly describes God’s mercy, He owes not save for His promise,
Neither the whole man, only the remnant he orders by reason,
Else be disposed, and so said I, Indeed if we ought to be honest
Flesh can endure, but may buckle before the relief of a redoubt in their treason,
Which he agreed, Inasmuch as we see each member diminished
Over our fullness of days, we observe some parts’ enervation
Faster than others, and this is betrayal before we are finished
Living in flesh, forasmuch was the launch of our sin’s deprivation
Wherewith our senses decided the course of the body and not mind,
Opening — pardon the parable — gate-house door to transgression;
Nodding along I was silent, for what I have prayed but could not find,
Lifelong fortitude, never was granted for my current possession,
Fortitude found in the running of rivery marshes and creatures
Living from times immemorial, what can survive all the ages
Not as the courage derive from the desert by destitute features,
Rather the sprint of diversity seen in its natural stages,
Est’ary nymphs to the fresh adolescence selecting for mating,
That by their own generation creation perpetuates blessing
Handed from heavenly Hand, for the living all seek for their sating
Appetites hungry for good, and by this are all things coalescing
Upward eternally, searching for One all the cosmos depended,
Guided from origins toward their ends as to which they are fated,
Causes appointed in effects, but evils in endings upended,
Coming from nothing as such, and the Lord in His ways is elated
Giving the world to His justice and lifting His people on wind-wings
Upward eternally, finding the Rock, the Creator of courage,
Acting with perfect election for God in the Torah-beginnings
Made us the world, from dividing the lights to establishing herbage,
Casting a light on the miser’ble matter of nothingness-never,
Raising a desert from dust and a marsh from the desert’s oasis,
Now we may journey it nowhere, and eking an eyeless endeavor
Favors no man, but I know he is here on a different basis,
This strange man has accompanied few to their own destinations
While himself but a talking-companion, a teacher and elder,
Asking me now, O my son, I am more than my wist-meditations:
When thou hadst journeyed again to thy house, thou hadst finally held her,
What did she say? and my heart stopped cold, and I said with a feeling,
Fear, I could stop and be frozen eternally here, and he nodded,
Then he replied, But I tell thee eternity moves, for the ceiling,
Heaven itself, is its image, and knowing the answer he prodded,
Now he shew me the gathering stars in their permanent fixtures
Spinning in circles across the celestial terraces lawf’ly,
Acting on orders primeval, and only by searching the scriptures
Man has determined their purpose, their province, their pedigrees lofty,
Carried by angels in grave mass motions of movement and tremor,
Watching us mortals in stray locomotion on treacherous trails trod;
Realizing this was no metaphor, this was no vocalized tenor,
Teachers and angels appear to us wroth back-sliders who fail God
Offering peaceable paths to return if we even regret it,
Casting aside all our wretched devices in perfect repentance
Though we are hardly alone, for no mortal temptations abetted
Merely by wish, for to really prepare for a holy acceptance
Man must turn from his faults and destroy him, himself to the spear’s end,
Lest he, deceiving himself, so imagine a vict’ry defeated
That he be turned from the face of the Lord, For I make for a fierce friend
Rabbi replied, If infused in a soul, by the time it’s completed,
Virtue perfects and effaces the missing, for never an image
Ever was made of iniquity, that be a faceless existence,
That it be called an existence at once, for it rather it pillage,
Leech on the good, and he spoke to me true, for an evil subsistance
Never subsisted, but somehow it stained us after transgression,
Abraham too; so I avered, To them He has given His presence,
Such is the Name in the children of God, but our current possession,
Time, time! forces from creatures it governs, repentance;
Time can destroy much evil, for evil retracts on its own head,
Therewith instead of destroying it even within incubation,
Mightier still is the patient, who stands on a quietest bone-bed
Over its enemy sworn, with the words of the Psalmist’ mentation,
Wait, so I say, on the Lord! on the lips of the righteous and waiting,
Wanting the perfect recumbrance of body to soul, the remarriage
Meant from the start, of the man to his wife and the sadness abating
Once he has come to her gladly, his love, his corporeal carriage;
When shall the kingdom rejoice? and the evil we know is permitted
Only to gently allow for the wayward to ward to His own way,
Evil no more by His grasp, and I know for the sins I committed,
Might I be left to the jackals unburied, wherever my bones lay,
God be escaped not, not at the ends of the earth or the oceans,
Even if heaven was opened and waters forever descended
Nothing could wash us from whence we have come, and the signs and the omens,
Those He entrusted us, therewith confirm it; the rabbi presented,
Now on a second occasion, his parable: Abram had heard it,
Suddenly crisp in the motion of air, as a whisp’ring suggestion,
That his investment in idols and Ur and his efforts concerted
Must be suspended, and Terah and Lot and his servant in question
Left for Haran, but the question of what it was like in the senses
Seems to be null, for the truth is the angels receive from Him likewise,
Reason’ble creatures as such, but the Lord by His wisdom dispenses
Well to His creatures in proper proportion, and each with the right size,
Using a turn of the word, and comparing it thusly, I venture,
When we are virtuous, what we are taught in an act of revealing
What we contain in our souls, we permit new knowledge to enter;
Wherefore the knowledge of virtue comports with the similar feeling
When it is God who is speaking and not one virtue’s possession,
Much as thou knowest the feeling of reason’ble acts, or forgiveness:
Only in silence; and somehow we shared in his words an obsession
Welcome and mutual, though with no word or expression in witness,
Only my silent agreement as sole of the signs for detection;
Bright blue heaven be pleased with me, even in smallest of small things,
Might I behave as to maximize silence so later inspection
Judges me righteous, and ev’ry prospective the coming of fall brings
Falls on me slowly and sheds of me not, I the perilous phantom
Married to flesh and a victim of being unmanful, for mine soul,
Strong and without right, seems to succumb to the bodily tantrums
Giving the flesh its desires, and then I forget the divine goal,
Then I no longer can hear God, only the silence of substance,
Which has in time grown darker and harder to find in the fury
After Hadassah was taken, and not in the months since
Might I have caught it as lightning, and now I, condemned by my jury,
Conscience, the seat of the Word of the Lord in my wretched assignment,
That in my soul I, entrusted to carry it mortally snow-white,
Found it perverse, for by reason we know of the planets’ alignment
Wherewith we worship the creature and fail to in deed or to know right
Growing impeded by carnal incessance and none introspection,
Even repurposing reason for ill; for if the mind with uncleanness
Posits the false, all the more is corrupted the man in election;
What is it then if the strength of the mind might recognize genus,
Lest it be species alone in existence? if judged as a weakness,
Owing to small intellection in finitude, share my agreement,
Though it is not as if this is to render is false, for obliqueness,
Found in the relative, owes to its God; I in this am vehement,
That if the different things are reflecting a heavenly glory,
Threading an image of God in the spaces of nothings and might sing
Choirs of angels in dominion-song the celestial story,
Only the mind of a man in his finitude reckons the right thing,
Reasoning through it, a waltz to the sun-set, promised the endless
Since he in intellect feels in himself an intractable longing
Toward eternity, which he without is but otherwise friendless,
Eyeing a high teleology cosmic beyond all its thronging,
Wherein the Voice of the only Creator is heard in an echo
Mired in holiest beauty, a star-light temple of dreaming:
After I find I can grasp it in hand, but before I can let go,
What can I hear in the silence a clamoring universe teeming;
When it was heard, so the rabbi began, in the dark of a grinding,
Hollowing cosmos, a subtlest whisper to Abram protruded
Whistling down in the sparkless abyss in the haunt of its finding
Probing for entry from out of eternity, ever eluded
Till it was heard and was tasted and eaten by Abram in full time–
Yea, it is this: for the Word of the Lord is inaudibly given,
Better compared to confections of bread-cakes, that is a good sign–
Scrolls to be swallowed, digested, absorbed to immediate-enliven;
That is the fact of our fathers, my child, the sound of their calling
Must be effectual only by utterly total infusion,
Sealing the heart as to perfectly rescue a man from his falling;
Much as the angels experience this by a simple conclusion,
Feeling as though it is nature itself, as it also in mortals
God has permitted to hear Him, and Abram whose call is his linking
Cosmic respect to a family, not by impermanent morsels
Fluttering down to the mind in the transient ways of our thinking
Might his reception of God’s Word come, but reality being,
Rather, the things of our God are no things to be felt in sensation,
Though we are urged to describe Him in sight and compare it to seeing,
Whereas the Lord is no subject of eyes to reflect ‘lumination,
Even the notion of seeing the Lord is a metaphor lethal
Where we are lost to the accidents native to idols constructed,
Which is the source for the error of heathens, the lot of their evil
Comes from their slavery down in material sheerly-corrupted,
Setting their nations and politics falsely on sandy foundations
Thinking the motions of stars are their own-ends, seeing the light-wall
Thinking it only exists for itself, and our own perturbations
Living amongst them show, as our kingdom returns to its night-fall
God is to never be loved as a hand with materials fulsome,
Loving Him only as means; for the want of a kingdom was fatal
Dragging us now to the East, and thou knowest of Abraham’s bosom
Hugging his children in writhing a mass in the complexes hadal,
There at the end of all things, to his offsp’ring lamenting, o Child,
Whither has destiny brought us? I ate of my fill of requiting,
Traveling naked and greatly uneased the lugubrious wild,
Feeling the blows of my enemies, heart-breaks, weeping and spiting,
Now is it that we are here to despair? or shall God be our prayer,
That in the Pit we are found to be waiting on what we expected,
That is, the Word of our Lord God here at the bottomless layer,
Shouting o Israel, come out! when shall He save His elected,
That for the first time ever we hear Him? and listening, waiting,
This strange rabbi was met with a pause and my leery supposing,
Saying The whips of indifferent winds as they run, fluctuating,
Filling the prophets with wisdom no man had his mind on proposing,
Granting a messenger, speaking for holy ideas and Divine Word,
Written, condemning us, closed as a letter to God of our trespass;
This I imagine thou felt in thy bones, and redounded to thine sword
That I was wilderness-driven again, and the color of days past
Tending a crackling fire with languishing drive and intention,
Knowing, inscribed on my mind, I can hear faint what He has given,
Which the rabbi replied, I would bring mine shame but to mention
That I was called to relate to thee also and spirit, enliven
What it was like for thy father in flesh as he journeyed, and knew pain,
Going to his calling with naught but the promise and never assuming,
Nay, he was faithful by hope — and he stopped, for so fell to us new rain
Which he considered a sign, for an alien season was blooming.
Headed to Babylon • camp by its rivers
the point of rabbi’s story • what does God sound like
hearing the call • a new season