The Hermit
Is it not sufficient ecstasy
to live at the Rim,
to find oneself a watcher on
the labyrinthine passageways?
Inside the circle of fire, a black orb vanishing.
Without the fire, there is no fire.
The moon, a glass-orb’d goddess object.
♦
That change cannot befall
what already is only change—
there is another order under which
what pressure brings to bear
upon the course the water takes
is the purchase of the Will.
The Artifex is a lantern man
harnessing his fire
to focus force
and force the world to burn
according to his measure,
as moon is measured change.
That man at the summit
of the pointed peak
either seen or seeing
is of the Rim—
shrouded, hooded, haloed
by black light
the vanishing orbs of that which the Rim encloses
the labyrinthine manner of the passaging
between an absolute harnessing
and the Horse Itself.
It was a matter of the station of the image.
To say that the harness were the moon
or that which only, when the orb is full,
declares its cool hegemony
convening an order at the cost of freedom—
as if to budge and twitter, to flow and dance
to give gesture to being
without prevenient harnessing
were freedom—
Yet the time of dancing is the full of the moon
and its ordered changes, figures
dancing.
No interdiction of the Image will withstand
The Harnessed Horse.
There is a course
before the choice to curb its very flowing.
The business was to find it
and to interdict
not Image but false ease—
to find the means by which apparencies
fold up in their possibility
to be apparencies—
their links with truth.
Every word a seed
the hazard
of a step
in a labyrinth—
accordingly, you cannot even know, while coursing, if it is
a course
if there is
a goddess object
nested in its midst—
a welcoming orb
gnoetic and refreshed
at the end of hazarding—
Every word an image
nested in a thought
every thought
harnessing its image
but giving it rein—
letting it run—
thought running with thought—
And the thought
is the labyrinth
that passes
between not saying
but knowing
Being
and a dark hegemony
that passes as light
and calls its goose-step
dancing.
♦♦
Horses
burning.
♦
There was a knowing
that set a course
of motion
to find the very thought
that set it out—
a motion toward the rim of an outstretched prairie:
West. A city
Of thought: East.
♦
The trace of the motion itself
confirms a text—
it shimmers dissipates
dispels
its urge
of onset
renewed
at every site within it
since surely every station
is a word
and every seed
a coil
wound and waiting
to hazard the moment
of its labyrinthine passaging—
The Self back East: Jerusalem—
Was. The City on the Hill
Is.
The thought of a certain rigor and
the thought of a certain height.
The Artifex, the Hermit, a tall
building. At night.
Or with night
inside it.
An elevator shaft
core shooting from nine sub-basements up
to the rotating tower, dizzy with starnight.
The building harbored a man—
an infinite call—a voiceless howling—
the rushing of the wind void
contained within the hollow
of the shaft
so that a core of tone emerged—
raspy, no longer voiceless,
a twine or chord of pitches
pithing the void.
That building loved us
in spite of its howling,
and we, at the bottom,
on the street or sidewalk
from which it heaved its enormous upness—
we were taken up into its sound—
Laughable
Outside of the world
Outside of the void that funds it
Unutterable
Monstrosity
Renewal
The Promise
Better than …