THEY FALL

Out of their source
That clear, endless peace of oneful delight.

They crash, hurl
Body into body
Decimal forms
Twisted into shapes
Essential
Condensed
Materialized.

Out
Downward
Given to the million-eyed lives
They number
In multitude
In diversity
Ignorant and pain-gnawed
Bent into meanings, movements
In gyres and convolutions

They fall.

They, the sons
They, the teachers of the teachers in time
Looking heavenwards, the trail fades
As blades of iron
Tears spatter and break
Confined in webs of bone and flesh
Networks of light
Complexed upon themselves
Unrarified
Eyes, ears, nose, hands
Asprout in generation
Male-female

They fall

Sprung from single seed
Idea into protoplasm
Yeilding possibility in time and space
Upwards and upwards
They fall
Wordless children
Marriage of innocence and experience.

O, where is resurrection
If they must fall so hard, so far
Like shards of light
Into darkness
Into opacity?
Only to remember
Those pools of clear wide depths
Where their eyes held unanswered bliss.

O, why must they fall?
Tools of some unsteady hand
Bearing up the naked bread
Untapped
Untouched
Unclothed, in the shells of form
Thirsty
In the seeking of the light
Grist for energies so gross
Through all these fields of precious stars
That all our mixtures cupped in blood and water
Cannot hold a wish to what it was
That might have been.

And we fall, and
As we watch them fall
There is no peace while hearts are restlessing.
Wrapped in robes of wear
In tears upon a tattered face
Do we owe them wings
That we must watch them fall so far?

The endless heave of wave upon the shore
The weave and mesh of rich gushed blessings
Weal of woe upon the rising hand
In bands of gold they fall
In choruses and ranks
Sun to scale
Hollow reptilian forms
Bodies set a-kilter
Each to each they seethe
To breech promise after promise
To beseech
Then to beguile the word.

The world is all a form
The art still-born
The fruit rots
The mother miscarries.

And the fall tolls on and on
Drums of palms turned down, they drown
Submerged like crystal vessels
Liquid membrane
Pulsing like the silver moon
The golden sun begun
But never seen by those
Whose thoughts turn down.

Like rain, release
O dear, dear Hand of God
There is no fall
But all returns to all
In one last pulse of endless love.

*************

A rush of birds- a screetch
Their wings like shields
Against the ragged rocks of time
Layers upon layers
Strata
Levels
Depths of involution
Until
Darkness becomes the light
Beyond which love
Dares not go!