Six candles gutter on a high altar for no reason at all.
In this clitoridian world only confession of ignorance
excites the light.
It is the perfect act of one determined to sing
in the o of not, o how good to let go
the bunched-up knickknacks of an acquiring life
and to zigzag naked between lightning bolts
in the faint hope of arresting a fleeting glance.
Everything runs on the dead
and the only reliable fuel is what we have yet to learn.
That's what reflections have to tell us
informed as they are by what's in back of them.
We're bathed in light our own,
entangled in each other's dreams,
glistening in ancient thought
and are the dew drops and berries
of cosmic briar,
hardly whom we say we are.
——————
The original title of this poem was High Mass. But when I searched my photo archive I found an image I had made with a zoom lens while watching a French cop show, and there in the subtitle was the word previously, indicating that I was watching scenes from the last episode to refresh my memory. The more I thought about this image the more I liked previously as the title, because I was, after all, talking about the ancient starlight in which we bathe, our entanglements with each other over time and space, and ultimately how little we understand time and space and interaction.
Previously