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Now reading
The Fire
jump stone hand leaf shadow sun
day plash coin light downstream fish
first loosen under boat harbor circle
old earth bronze dark wall waver
new smell purl close wet green
now rise foot warm hold cool
blood disk
horizon flame
the day at the window
the rain at the window
the night and the star at the window .
Do you know the old language?
I do not know the old language.
Do you know the language of the old belief?
From the wood we thot burning
our animal spirits flee, seeking refuge wherever,
as ifin Eden, inthis panic
lion and lamb lie down, quail
heed not the eagle in flight before the flames high
over head go.
We see at last the man-faced roe and his
gentle mate; the wild boar too
turns a human face. In whose visages no terror
but a philosophic sorrow shows. The ox
is fierce with terror, his thick tongue
slavers and sticks out panting
to make the gorgoneion face.
(This is Piero di Cosimo's great painting, A Forest Fire,
dated 1490-1500, preserved in the Ashmolean Museum at
Oxford.)
He inherits the sfumato of Leonardo da Vinci;
there is a softening of outline. His color fuses.
A glow at the old borders makes
magic Pletho, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola prepared,
reviving in David's song,
Saul in his flaming rage heard, music
Orpheus first playd,
cords and melodies of the spell that binds
the many in conflict in contrasts of one mind.
"For, since song and sound arise from the cognition of the mind,
and the impetus of the phantasy, and the feeling of the heart, and,
together with the air they have broken up and temperd, strike the
aerial spirit of the hearer, which is the junction of the soul and the
body, they easily move the phantasy, affect the heart and penetrate
into the deep recesses of the mind"
Di Cosimo's feathery, furry, leafy
boundaries where even the Furies are birds
and blur in higher harmonies Eumenides;
whose animals entering a charmd field
in the light of his vision, a stillness,
have their dreamy glades and pastures.
The flames, the smoke. The curious
sharp focus in a glow sight
in the Anima Mundi has.
Where in the North (1500) shown in Bosch's illumination
Hell breaks out an opposing music.
The faces of the deluded leer, faint in lewd praise,
close their eyes in voluptuous torment,
enthralld by fear, avidly
following the daily news: the earthquakes, eruptions,
flaming automobiles, enraged lovers, wars against
communism, heroin addicts, police raids, race riots,
caught in the 'lascivia animi' of this vain sound.
And we see at last the faces of evil openly
over us,
bestial extrusions no true animal face knows.
There are rats, snakes, toads, Boehme tells us,
that are the Devil's creatures. There is
a Devil's mimic of man, a Devil's chemistry.
The Christ closes His eyes, bearing the Cross
as if dreaming. Is His Kingdom
not of this world, but a dream of the Anima Mundi,
the World-Ensouling?
The painter's sfumato gives His face
pastoral stillness amidst terror, sorrow
that has an echo in the stag's face we saw before.
About Him, as ifto drown sweet music out,
Satan looks forth from
men's faces:
Eisenhower's idiot grin, Nixon's
black jaw, the sly glare in Goldwater's eye, or
the look of Stevenson lying that the nation keep face.
His face multiplies from the time of Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler,
Mussolini, Churchill; from the dream
of Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Vannevar Bush,
brooding the nightmare formulae, to win the war! the
inevitable . at Los Alamos,
plotting the holocaust of Hiroshima,
Teller openly for the anti-Christ-
glints of the evil that one sees in the power of this world
"In the North and East, swarms of dough-faces, office-vermin,
kept-editors, clerks, attachés of ten thousand officers and their
parties, aware of nothing further than the drip and spoil of politics-
ignorant of principles. . . . In the South, no end of blusterers, brag-
garts, windy, melodramatic, continually screaming, in falsetto, a
nuisance to These States, their own just as much as any... and
with the most incredible successes, having pistol'd, bludgeoned,
yelled and threatened America, the past twenty years into one long
train of cowardly concessions, and still not through but rather at
the commencement. Their cherished secret scheme is to dissolve the
union of These States" -Whitman, 1850.
faces of Princes, Popes, Prime Usurers, Presidents
of Clubs, Nations, Legions, the Gang-Leaders.
Now the City, impoverisht, swollen, dreams
the great plagues-typhus, syphilis, the black buboes,
epidemics, manias.
My Name is Legion and in every Nation I multiply.
Over those who would be Great Nations Great Evils.
They are burning the woods, the brushlands; the
grassy fields razed; their
profitable suburbs spread.
Pan's land, the pagan countryside, they'd
lay waste.
cool green waver circle fish sun
hold wet wall harbor downstream shadow
warm close dark boat light leaf
foot purl bronze under coin hand
rise smell earth loosen plash stone
now new old first day jump