Canticle on the Ennearchy
XXXIX
The Lord God of heaven, who took me out of my father’s house,
And out of my native country, spoke to me.
Healed by calamitous times, he was called in his tent by a king’s voice,
Like a desire, a want in the wilderness dismally crying,
Far to the west, but the politics seemed good, tasting a drink choice
Makes drunk every man it ensnares, for on princes relying
Grief is returned, but as Abraham listened, as bright alexandrite,
Mended his wounded intentions and filled him with obstinate terror;
Swallowed him darkness did, darkened his eyes, so to trembling hand-write
Furnished a record to keep of the journey, a mystical-sharer,
Abraham, watching the stars and observing the seasonal changes
Found in the heavens remarkable signs, and in God he delighted
Fixing the stars in their places and gave each planet its ranges,
Drawing celestial spheres from the waters His fires requited
Bursting empyrean orbits about God, dancing and singing,
Spinning and pulsing with energies, powers and lights magister’al
Cloaked in the dazzling darkness of heaven eternally bringing,
One by another, the Providence spake from the Highest ether’al,
Showing his secrets in hidden attention His heaven evinces,
Each light sternly observing demesnes and their taciturn motions
Fixed as the rotating spheres drum heavily, home of their princes,
Subject to neither decay or derision or blight or erosions
After the wandering stars God chained in the void He created
Under the myriad darknesses; captive in finitude’s fetters,
Manacled due to their sin, these learn to be patient and waited
Knowing the day of the judgment approaches and loathe of their betters
Knowing the day shall resound when things from the highest domin’ons
Down to the lowest of dirt shall be judged on the matter of matters,
Coming from God to be judged by the Lord, and no shadowy pin’ons
Fall on the soul on the day of His vengeance; the trumpets of satyrs,
Singing of nymphs, imitations of goats and liturgy-choirs
Wash on the dead shores men have presented the demons with skel-wings,
Offerings tainted with want and corruption so when he retires
Man is with guilt of desiring broken and botulous fell-things
Making him weaker, but Abram had known with conviction and violence
What it would cost to deliver a man from himself in failing,
Saving his nephew from kings and considered his soul with defiance
Toward his own, but I ruin my verse with excessive detailing:
Abram was called to a prophecy, suffered the plucks of the Lord’s harp,
Knowing the futile invention of evil was nothing so precious
That it was worth long fear, for the Word of the Lord is a sword sharp
Severing spirit and soul, and with this as my opulent preface
Abraham sought from his God this likeness: no shadow of turning,
Not as the planets, and even the stars who all shimmer and twinkle,
Only the motionless rest of a fiery stasis of burning,
Prior to cooling, before signs, absent of weakness and wrinkle
Over the blanket of heaven, the ground and the sky everlasting,
Abram from childhood read from the heavenly tapestry’s threading
Needing to know its design, and with study and prayer and fasting
Came to a knowledge unblemished by lust, so his levirate wedding
Knowing his bride had no way to conceive, for she proved be infertile
Whilst in her marriage before, but the arrow is shot by the archer,
Abram considered, and virtue depends on the choice and no hurdle,
Even a dead womb, dredges the righteous, and Abram’s departure
Once he disputed his father, was out of his love for the calling,
Seeing the glorious things God made in the rhythm-rotation,
Saw but beyond it to God and, recording it seemed him appalling
Twixt all the patterns of planets, mercurial symbol-notation,
Found for himself true visions of God in the clarity boundless
Suddenly rapturing intellect that a distraction would squander,
Reason? no, something of better proportion, an echoing soundless
Falling to mind from the Teacher of angels in cognitive-wander;
Then he, Abram, was bound to his reason, no purpose in squirming,
Trying to flee from the suction of knowledge with bouletive crush-weight:
Dropping the scrolls, he prepared for the journey, to venture for learning,
Fleeing from evil with due haste, seeking to meet his unrushed fate
Toward the land of his promise and naught his intent of returning,
Where in his age he would give to his sons of concubinage portion
Thinking of what he surrendered in heeding the call and the spurning
Which it required for father and home, and without a contortion
Realize the nations of Keturah, far from the lure of her fair face
Came from his want for a home, for a prince in his caravan travel
Never departs from the bondage of cities, and seeing the stair-case
God would descend on the stones, he could weep on eponymous gravel
Thinking himself a beguiler, a thief, a philandering traitor,
Thinking himself not, fathering many a disparate peoples
Only to multiply promises, blessing the Lord has for later,
Drawing from nothing the things He creates as if gathering eagles
Hanging on something but wings, for the wind and its desolate rattle
Stirs up the trees and deposes the leaves with the candor of fate, chance,
Spirit, the will of the Lord and His choice as if choosing in battle
Victors by vectors incalcu’ble, swerving in wild a great dance
Round the Creator, their wants and their pulsating rhythms and circuits
Coming to likeness, creation is called into being as God sings,
Each of His creatures arising from naught and its watery surface
Drawn to Him charged with His own Word, carried by angels with broad wings
Toward His gracious designs, and the spiraling pantomime motion
Abram discerned in the chartless abyss of untouchable heaven,
Seeing the Lord God give each likeness a governing notion
Found in eternity; mutual, shadowed perfection progression;
Abram was prostrate on marble, with tears on his opulent clothing,
Knowing the voice of the Lord from the silence of sensible prattel,
Seated in conscience, and love touched Abram and cured him his loathing,
Gasping for air and for clarity Abram prepared for his travel,
Not with the mind to explain, for no man can explain his decisions
When it is reason’ble, that from the basis of reason in acting
Only the reason’ble know it, the ignorant lack the conditions
Needed for seeing the light incandescent aflame and refracting,
Which had determined for Abram a course for his subsequent vagrance,
Fleeing from Babel and Nimr’d and fires from idoler’s furnace
Toward a promise, but what did he see? the gratuity, flagrance,
Loving creation and motions by which things triumph in earnest
Turning the heavenly star-signs cycle, and not as a blunder,
Rather a mystical matter, the equinox moving as host-kings
Changing the shape of the night sky, carrying off with their plunder
Till it was time for the next, and the changes all shewed, as with most things
Hallowed calamities falling as leaves to the trumpets of autumn
Transported down on the rivery surface, and stout perseverance,
Hours in waiting, retains them over the sediment bottom
Yawing a gap twixt these and the grounds of its being-adherence,
Held in suspense by a likeness and diff’rence disrupted by cursed man;
What by the fires of Babel could man ascertain by his callous,
Venturous mind? for he works to the wages of earth and a worse ban
Governing creatures for sinking to prisons but made for his malice:
What could the Lord gain making a thing to predestine for dungeon?
This is confusing to many, but Abraham thought it undour,
Much as the call was relayed to his heart for particular function,
What we receive is the pestilence then of our natural power
Given with freedom eternal, but used with our human pretension,
Finding advantage a personal good man rose to acquire,
Always concocting a use for his talents for evil invention,
Giving the proverb us: only a genius might be a liar;
Similar sentiments govern the want for a judgment’s obscurement,
Greeting the man who observes all apparent injustice, misfortune,
Whether his own or imagined, and bent on the reasons’ procurement
Watching the skies, man watches the sky for its eschaton-torsion
Fevered and furling, the comeliest flame on the heavenly wicker
Opal in color and ragged in shoot, for cerulean tassels
Dangle on hems of our cloaks to remind us in hesitant flicker
Sterling angelic dominions hail us their heavenly vassals
Dot the cascadence of indigos drawn to the lanterns converging
One to another with each one flashing as kin of their section
Quartered in heaven, the tapestry framing a portrait emerging,
Yea, and its ministers patterns of God by His own predilection;
Motionless, God is remembered in motion, as metals are smelted
Each with their properties meant for the whole, so the image is ferried
‘Cross the celestial gardens, but not in the icons of belted,
Bawdy mythologized men, but the Lord who is silent and tarried,
Calmly appoints to the dawn-sun chariot zodiac masters
Carrying solar pedestrian towards millennia wanting,
Twelve to be chosen, and twelve to be thrust back down by disasters
Till it is time for the king — once, soon — to return from his haunting,
Wielding assiduous sword and the strength to recharter his dial,
This, the Messiah, the ravaging force in displaced revolution,
Comes to commence the redoubtable age in the ending of trial
Scattered among stars named by a different a region’s locution
Reads the Messiah, the Name catastrophic, the want of the wishing,
Chartering each of the dim constellations for heavenly-faring,
Riding on lambs and the warriors, fishes and men who are fishing
Gathered together in placated doubles and reckon’ble pairing
Turning the Mill of the Skies on the axis of signs’ convocation
Grinding the silver to salt and salt to inferior palettes
Till at the barest of barest the signs can become adumbration,
Nailing the Name to their posts, on their faces, with punitive mallets
Sealing a mask of celestial steel so exotic and comely
Nothing compared, for indeed it is miracled crown monolithic
Shining upon all the world, light scattered on surfaces glumly
Making the dark universal and light due meanings specific,
Which from empyrean heaven has cast down teachings judicious
Wherein the darkness of God is the brightness of mental abstractions,
Thence in the light of the Lord is the dazzling darkness factitious
Surging with purposeful writhes, undulations of spangled refractions
Speaking a language proportioned to souls’ penetrations impartial
Even if finite and small, for the oak has no hate for the bramble,
Only a punishing pity, and pity itself can be martial
When it is played with, for games are of consequence great in its gamble,
Well-ascertained by the old in their wisdom, and fun for the child,
That in a victory games can acquire a gloss by their token
Making the outcomes of highest importance, an end unreviled
When it is fair — for the game is a stake when rules are unbroken —
This is the fact of the game, for the man in his breadth existence
Wagers himself, he proposes to bid for his life by his living,
Fusing the play with the currency, making his gamble subsistence;
What are the rules? but we know, it is won in the life we are giving,
What a conception! we win by our own play (canons obeying),
Only admitting defeat if we stoop to the tactics of cheating,
Which makes man the opponent of God, and the surest of sayings:
One who has vied with the Lord has but earned for himself his defeating;
Secrets in heaven impress on the signs, stars-sentinels guarding
High revelations, the princely successions of senescence softly,
Emperors written in language celestial, laden in barding
Though by invention a man can expect new destinies lofty,
Which in the practice of magi was wont for their payment (or killing)
Which could discern from the heavens the facts of the Lord by His deigning,
Though it is wondrous a quest if a magus in practical billing
Knew he could only observe these things. or if God was restraining,
Acting in modes indiscern’bly restricted by only His counsel,
Willing His will (a formality?) — finding no cause for promotion
Whether between this thing or another, and thence its announcal,
What He creates, contemplation the means of detecting the notion
Which had derived from the Source, and as much as it guides its fruition
Essence is also a flux of the circumstance stamping its pressure,
Outside or inside, for creatures its own constitution, position,
Comes from the mold to transcendence and what is its immanent measure:
What is beyond is within, so identity past its ‘wn capture,
Ever-ungrasped, a relation, a tether to holiest deigning,
Raising to stars from the dust, for the stars are of dust but in stature
Duly arranged in their ways, for to reckon it lends its explaining;
Abram disposed his divine ruminations to categ’ries torpid
When he discovered the signs to the west which granted apprisement
Toward its place in the scheme of creation, the lily and orchid,
Rose of the apple, the fig on the vine and the old tantalizement
Governing appetites, goods by assignment, celestial classes
Mounted on star-borne charts to the rigid demands of perfection
Drawn from the archetype, even so, ordering masses on masses
Treading on dust and from dust for the marvelous gaze of inspection;
Major effulgences breaking the nothingness-thresholds to cower,
Raising a thing from abysses unreal, as the stars do prediction,
Stupefied luminous factors reflecting their ominous hour
Terrorized always by streaks of the Holy Beyond for conviction;
Where can the terminus rest, we may ask, but to horizons perish,
Carrying new constellations to mansions the Lord has established
Each for their time, and the Age of the Twins and their luminous garish
Toward the sacrificed Bull, for the woman it soon shall have ravished
Yearns for the Lamb and the Fish, and the ages of good overflowing
Spelled in the stars were unveiled by the magi who still were proceeding
Till it was come to the King who would take to the present in knowing
What was received would be someday returned to the horrors acceding
Fell on the vision of prophets, the haunt of a seer from cradle
Chosen for work as would suit him, the beautiful word of the last turn
Finding him able, a final precession for symbols of fable
Marking their reigns in the motions of skies, pale-star in a blast-burn
Torching the great constellations from heaven and leaving the minor
Watching distressed from the audience-chambers of zodiac dressing
Which so reveals but the infinite span of designed from Designer,
Marvel from marvelous, goodness from good and the blessed from the blessing,
That the calamitous mission creation embarks, for from green’ry,
Living but still, to the mightiest mythical predators fatal,
Ev’rything offers itself to the ban for a fiery scen’ry,
Mightier sign in their blood to be swallowed, as earth did to Abel,
Endlessly sacrificed always and now with a turbulent crying
Lain on the altar of skull-black skies: cold, scowled and callous,
Knowing no fact but destruction, it even consumes as it’s dying
Light from the stars as to leave no demesne in celestial palace
Glinting with liveliest rectitude, challenged to heat effervescent
While the cold-plunge deeps’ mastication of lumin’ries white-hot
Force the resplendence sequesters and even the waning of crescent
When it is come to the moon, o the icon of sun, and shall fight not
When it is due for its next disappearance, but find it undreadful,
Yea, oh thou Man, the illusion is not as it seems to have power,
Which is the diff’rence between things real and created as headful
Helping the finite to find, as it stands, on the route to the Tower —
Abram embarked for the same place reasoning awful and striking
That, overcome with a dread sight knowing the pillory pallid,
Scarlet and white with the innocent red and the white of our liking
Made for a master and servant at once incontestably valid
Though to be peaceable, shattered, unsightly, disturbing and paleful
Means at the sight of It Abram at once could withdraw from Its ill-got,
Fright’ning appearance and then be compelled to adventure the baleful,
Militant course, and his rights he revoked so in Babel he’d still not,
Nothing in hand, be so tempted to come back, less for a trifle:
Empires, fortresses, palaces, herds with no blemish nor speckle,
These are the wants of the flesh good souls have no int’rest to rifle,
Since in his soul he was good, and he measured by heavenly shekel
Over all things, but by heavenly hosts and their requisite choir
Abram adored not, even if deference each had a share in,
That he be never distracted by earth and its tantalized briar;
Abram so loved God, that in loving his wife who was barren
Showed us a model of faith, for the senses and felt-of impressions
Challenged him not, for by reason, belief in the Lord of all praising
Abram was credited righteousness; and us sons who have made from him pious confessions
Also he saw in the stars, and he wept at Jerusalem’s razing
When it stood in the stark declaration of luminous-scorching
Glowing with wrath on a sin of adulterous monuments muted
Needing the hands of the other, the foreigner, bringing with torching
Judgment of consequence greater than empires, sentence commuted
Only with trembl’ng repentance, the new mind got by a heart fresh
Which of itself is the sizzl’ng ignition of merciful fire
Dancing from God to the meager reception by evil and dark flesh,
Cleansing its stain, and so therefore the call would bestow the desire
Turning the eyes from the ground to the sky and from sky to beyond eyes,
Even the magi with means to discern had no sight to its meaning,
Wherefore the lyra in melody, wherefore the stars in a swan-dive,
Wherefore the stellion scampering, wherefore the foxlet convening?
Many a mirror of things on the earth, for the truth alongside these
Links to the down and the up; and the high to the low as it teeters
Thus circumambulates through all of life, and so taller than high trees,
Lower than thistles and whirl-pools porting the seas to the cedars
Drowning the sands, and the mill which turns on a turbine of mastic
Churns up the scenery, verdant in bloomage and fusch’a in stalking,
Throat of the three worlds: Hell, Earth, Heaven; its working fantastic
Moving the cosmos beneath foot, Abram in heeding, and walking.
called in his tent • Abram’s horror
the magi’s science • stars’ hidden Law
God’s great secret • to answer the call