Canticle of Trepidation
XIX
But Jeremias remained in the entry of the prison until the day that Jerusalem was taken:
And it came to pass that Jerusalem was taken.
Blustered on land-scape sculpted by weltering winds in commotion,
Riding on dubious foot-falls placed by a colt in confusion,
This was the trek I had anxiously measured replete with emotion,
Cresting laborious hills to be greeted with specious illusion
Whether by smoke or by rain-clouds haunting the darkening twilight
Hovering taunts bared face at my hurrying strides up around clefts
That I, aware of the fact I had nothing for setting the sky right
When I returned if marauders be present, engaging abound thefts,
Might I prepare for engagement? with handicapped options for fighting,
Rather to wait on the wing as a coward for them in departure,
Leaving to whims by beloved — I perish the thought unexciting,
Even I, craven as ever, beware of the draw of the archer,
Thrusting of lances or eye of the savage, as man and as bonded,
Bow down not for the passions of flight if I dare to respire,
Never felicitous countenance came to the man who absconded
When he was called to defend to the death wife, widow or shire,
Far be it! even if thus is the Lord’s good gift in reproving
Something is churning inside of my gut I cannot but elicit,
This trepidation of worries afar I am hurr’edly moving —
Nay! it is greater, a phantom but mighty and hardly explicit
Thrashing above in the evening unseen as I enter a drier,
Drearier world in the spaces between red mountain abidance,
Here in its spurious liminal crevasse dividing a higher,
Haughtier truth from my humble return by celestial guidance
Learning as much of my next destination as what in the lofty,
Leery turbidity further on waits to display of its crude head,
Fast I was moving on colt-back, steps fell ever so softly
Washed in the cold glow sealed in the chasm by radiance, blue-dead,
Common to walks in sublunary misery, second to second
Watching for signs of destruction in moon-light, such as a plume-bun,
Black smoke stretched on a black sky, something I feared and I reckoned,
Though for a long time, only the walls first spirits had loom-spun,
Fissures of titanous figures primeval had languished in stitches
Splayed on its carcass with channels to beckon my doomed obligation
Watching my flight in a silent cathedral, but absent of riches,
Hooded with summits and keeping a vigil of solemn purgation
Lest my despair be diminished and hope finds ground to establish;
Nay, in my haste I be nothing to stone in primordial tarry,
Summoning heavens, to wit, cloud-ferried on mysteries lavish
Holding their peace from the destitute men from the face of their ferry
Making my nervous embarking on donkey perchance of the certain,
Hardly a venture on motionless footing I venture to aver:
Pulling away at the future, unfolding its netherless curtain
Trembling every step of the journey and wishing to waver —
Opposite that of the soundless demeanor of the wilderness placid,
Echoing the colt in its grunting and chattering clink of the trammel
Carried as wisps by the breath of the earth indisposed to its acid,
That noise foreign to peace man brings on the back of his camel,
Merchant or soldier or something of consonant men’s occupation
Each an affront, like some inconsiderate man’s decision
Reaching about with a grope, for an echo is like expectation
Needing response and the powerful silence is a deathly derision
Equally terrible, lonely and tepid, and most of all sober,
Locked in the land-scape, quiet indifference drilled in its facets
Leaving a cruelty aching in sands borne upward and over
Stinging my eyes and eliciting brays from the colt as we pass it
Facing a stuttering wind from a break in the valley and pierce
Crags and contours once suddenly shifted, with creatures with homes in
Scurried and scattered, reminding me somewhat how man disappears,
Flatter perspicuous truth as if only received by an omen,
After a touch with reality flee from the truth and had oft left
Leaving him nothing to cope with but time, as I wont to have theorized
After departing Hadassah in ages ago in my soft theft;
Seeing the same path now have I come to see and have realized,
Under the supporting columns of basalt and capitaled blunt crowns
Stealing the last of the sun-light left as it ceased from its spinning
Over the earth, as its rays snaked canyon; my vision it hunts down
Growing the shadows of earthenware features, the bows of it grinning
Till it has faded to black, so I walk with no light but a trifle
Somewhere beyond with a muted and odious color of lurid,
Leprous and mocking maroon found flickering, hardly I stifle
Groans from my chest, for a fire it seems but I leave it unworded
Lest I confirm it as such and acknowledge the burn of a wooded,
Daubed and restored place, closest to home a location I might call,
High on plateau and adjacent to Edom, fortuitous-footed,
Razed to foundations and taken of spoils in haunt of a night-fall —
Nay, I am not so impious to deem of my fortunes the vicious
Having survived an assault by a demon and blasphemer turgid,
One in the desert unknown with a wiled demeanor capricious
One who has fallen for stories by women and Greeks who converted
Lest I be turned by the styles of patricide, following whimsy,
Calling the faith of my fathers a thing for reform or defective,
Might I be one in the need of a change for I prove to be flimsy
Next to the century-living traditions the Lord has elected,
Thus I content to dismiss all the sorts of impulses divisive
Seeking to worm in by wonder and finding its way in implicit;
Seeking with eyes (erred: eye) of my own the incisive,
What has the Lord done? proven by where I can walk and solicit,
Not in Egyptian reserve nor in Babylon exile-service;
After a time and a time as the light had arranged to beguile
Ever-increasing in certainty that it was flame, and I, nervous,
Knew as I drew close something was burning in pyre and pile
Whether my own vale found by the bandits and left for me broken,
Versus a tragedy elsewhere, a ravishing down in the low-lands,
Foreign to us, like burnt off’rings or taken as token,
Brought to destruction on high-place altars of garnishing snow-bands
Rising with ashes and mutable instrument ornamentation
Carried on winds with no voice, dark, poiseless and tragic’lly rural
Till it dispersed in the heavens and carnage was sate to cessation;
Whether my own was oblation or others, or horribly plural
Crispened to holy consumption and swallowed as quickly as stubble,
Such was unknown for the moment, the sight was shrouded by ridges,
Staunchly concealing the road I was treading and all of its trouble,
Might it be God took mine He had given, the total of smidges,
Land and a wife, as I only received in a recency dire:
Only a man at his roots can experience such trepidation,
Seen his belongings destroyed in mysterious pyre
Wondering painfully what of it mattered, beyond estimation,
Even if sins were repaid and the tops of the mountains were star-struck,
What of my tears can survive but its loosening echo, a spate noise
Fleeting as vapor and barely remembered, a misery harp-pluck,
Mentioned by none? and reserving my worries I pray to, with great poise,
God in the highest of heavens above, and I pour my imploring,
Even if it comes by His pleasure, to bring it to sight all the sooner;
Loss I can take, but the waiting and worry is internal warring,
Treading by fiery torches afar and a guide by the lunar
Found trepidation again, for the rhythm of something disturbing,
What is exciting the mind to consider the possibly truly,
Comes as a series of blows, not weighed all along but reverbing;
Each of the steps of the colt chafed cloth from its texturing wooly
Equal in kind agitation to this, but the smoke as it hovered
Seemed to be forming the world as the early arousing of sea-smoke
Late in the season of rains, and the size of the area covered,
Hiding the sky twixt moon-light, looked as the sea with a reed cloak,
Fingers of white irrigating the heavens with crescent cascading,
Casting upon red cliffs on the bound’ry of Edomite summit
Ripples of silvery waters I knew by their rotating shading
Eagerly swaying to music unheard in the scenery’s plummet
Down to the valley I recognized, firmly my bosom was seizing
Feeling familiar slopes of return, an intense escalation
Down the decline, each mark as a taunt and no longer so pleasing;
Each day sundered by sun had become to my mind perturbation,
Finding no words but the mention of something amiss and unfateful
Trudging defile with glum reservation and want to retire
Little by little approaching a place once cause to be grateful
Now in a night-time dread and surreal heat, cause to perspire;
Lit by the far-off flames and the moon was the trail I was treading
Duly uncertain of how to respond if my fears were of merit,
Whether I fight or I flee or I mourn, I had guilt of abetting
Leaving at all! and the language itself is a witness to bear it
Every flagrant description, a quote from a source I had bludgeoned
Suiting a need of my own, for our words are all borrowed and precious,
Reason created by God to employ on our tongues as it’s summoned,
Making our language the grounds for creation, and reason its preface
Finding the words for a feeling, a brute fact felt but so reachless
Only can pray’r apprehend it, so merkavah — Chariot mystics —
Capture the spark in the consciousness lived but expressionless, speechless,
Rendering upward the justice in writing, developing juristics,
Proving in fabled, discursive unknowns that man in his roving
Barely possesses the means for lucidity, meanings to aver,
Weakly can mortals employ tongues; that he has, through his own groving,
Made for himself tongues, nay! we be ought to respect and to quaver,
Holding the licking of fiery reason in hand as a bezel
Pointing to heavenly hand! for by music and poems and tossed tones
Dignity chrisms the man on his rung on the ladder of Bethel,
Plunging his senses to sod underneath, in my mem’ries of lost stones
Fending himself to his thoughts, affording it something subjunctive,
Thus as I, only a man with a nature unable to vacate,
Trembling now with a passion, my mind and my body adjunctive,
Consonant rage as but vengeance could possibly, bitterly placate
Found for myself this purpose, like burgling flesh for its rubies,
Sought in the journey a double apportioning, a right as assentient,
Whether the valley was safe and had proof of my care and my duties,
Otherwise burning to ash I was eager to see it all trenchant
Seeing as now I was under the spell of a tractable feeling,
Anger and fear and of course trepidation result in closed throat,
Which I was victim — of these I preferred to the most unappealing,
That of distress, rage; fear is the mark of a man who is ghost-wrote,
Willing against will, dead to himself but alive and demanded,
Something akin to enslavement, and firmest volitions are pried loose —
Pardon the metaphor: Edom as earth we depart empty-handed,
Man in his mind and his flesh apportion the will to divide use,
Crossing the threshold from Edom to Israel, neither by river,
Neither by wrestling womb but as equally sundered in linking:
What has a brother to keep with his kindred but bones to deliver,
This was the question of Cain (and so goes my incessantly thinking)
When in a moment, the colt had collapsed in spontaneous fury,
Knocking me down to the ghast-white earth intermingled with red dust
Suddenly startled and kicked into air by my fall in a hurry;
Feeling my arm jolt lightning, my thin beard mottled, my head mussed,
Turning to see by the pace I had kept was a probable error,
This rushed colt had encountered a scorp’on it trampled,
Now on its right fore-leg had beswelled to a sizable terror,
Such was its size and its fury before I had never exampled,
Still I was neither by passion nor reason supposing to treat it,
Ran — I was slower on foot but was wont to be quicker by running
Knowing the colt was abandoned to death, and to this I conceded
Feeling no grief by a loss as it were, to a scorpions’ cunning
Trusting the greater undoing at hand was no donkey in death’s grasp,
Bounding I fled on the last stretch back to the valley I tended
Hearing the bleats of the colt as it closed on the way to its breaths last
Wavering not on my charge to discover if more was upended;
Trodden on gravely stretches of road, flesh-crimson and shaded,
Gone underfoot with a crunch, an announcement to those it is shown to:
Beckoning heaven with want of reprieve for its glory now faded
Every stone was a mountain and every pebble a stone too,
Languishing more than the corpses of cities of mortal invention,
Since God-hewn stone merits superior dignity heeded
That it was fashioned by Reason Divine and eternal intention
Rather than used by a man for temporal a purpose as needed,
Almost as though time forces from creatures it governs repentance,
Saying to these, turn back! and with justice unwavering, does it,
Carrying always to completion regretful and derelict sentence
Toppling even the works of the Lord by His hand from His summit
Making the world as it stands but a phantom, a specter envapored,
Smoke on the juts of the earth I approached with a worry abounding,
Slowing myself but a small bit skidding the path as it tapered,
Narrowing towards the crag in the smooth wall guarding the bound’ry,
Thinking of visible good as a sign of the God-who-has-seen-me
Saving the slave releasing the captive, a blessing on victims
After their hour has passed, who will find at the springs by His green trees
Something of truth, I imagine, for none have the right to convict Him,
Which I remembered in time; in the moment I witnessed the pyre,
Nothing had felt worse since I was maimed in the desert by evil,
Writhing about in a clamorous loss with the wish to expire,
Then for a season I worked with the ardor and awe of an eagle
Spreading a wing for the ribbony grasp of the heavenly breezes,
Pray’rful and true, but with blessings a curse and with curses a fire,
Burning the valley I tilled with indiff’rence inscribed on its friezes,
Those black flames in their triangled forms thrust upward to higher,
Greater indiff’rence in heaven, with nothing to show of my labor,
Neither Hadassah, in clamoring over the structureless rubble
Not by her hair nor remains nor a sign I could locate her later:
Even the wicked responsible left, and no gift for my trouble
Etched on an ostracon letter to thank me for food or the taken,
This I could never allow; for my sins were alone of my making,
Not for my wife to repay, and I felt in me something awaken,
Awful and bitter, reprieved not vengeance against its awaking —
Marred by a hatred I harbored in otherwise placid exposure,
Now as ignited as this vale scorched by an avarice chance-got:
Garden of sleep laid ruin, and gone for the colt his enclosure,
Leaving a black recompense, and at first for Hadassah I glanced not,
Keeping to fear if she struggled or even succumbed to marauders,
Thinking it better to live with a shame than be slain for survival
Though as for signs of her presence at all, of an innocent slaughtered
Nothing was here, and my effort expanded and, far from a trifle
This was the call of a husband who, bound to his home, was remanded,
Rummaging plainly among hot rubble and mud as it melted
Caking myself as I searched in its foul remains, single-handed,
Nothing was here; for the time I suspended the task and unbelted,
Taking my gird from my loins and descending to soil to embitter,
Weeping a moment but simmering coolly as best as I managed,
Feeling the wet from my tears singe harshly, I must reconsider,
Should I increase in my pain — so I stopped, took stock of the damage:
Razed to the stones of foundation and turned to the mud of its baked brick,
Even my cisterns were filled! as I took in, my vision was blotching
Seeing the rhythm of fire on all of my gatherings laid thick
Felt in the moment as proof God turned and no longer was watching.
charging through the vale • light disappears to night
colt is incapacitated • bearing the rest on foot
all is destroyed • anger