CANTO 5 This morning

 

This morning grackles held a vast conventicle
concatenating out of the trees like blowing
dandelion seeds. Blue- and sun- sky swells

in the tomato whose blood-juice sings

in my stomach while a cicada like a tuning-fork

thrums the sympathetic note, the om that fills the tent

light now against its stakes. Dwell, then,

on the perfection of this day whose squirrels

harangue my typewriter while the new melons’ scent

weaves in and out with the broad tide of September winds.

All the woods are adrift in an atmosphere

that swings with the earth in an equipoise

to soothe the temper of tectonic plates.

Beneath the deepest calm lies violence

too mean for fears. Steady then

in the knowledge of personal extinction I revel in the sway

of the senses and take them to their limits.

A twig clatters on the canvas tympanum.

The buzz of a light plane merges with the wash of trees,

that ocean of rushing leaves, and again the cicada threads

the eye of these perceptions,

sutra-ing the old indecisons, thrumming Blake hymn:

Emerging now, the sacred text of the finite mind.

Untranslatable, yet bound in the texture of the slightest ordinary life.

Unrepeatable, yet pulsing in the most green blood of the remotest alien.

Submerged, like incoming bits from the farthest probe x-rayed in static.

Eaten, like intricate hemoglobin devoured by voracious macrophage.

Tracked and hunted in a maniacal fever by the materialist empiricist mind.

Scarred by and yet scarring the thinnest most sensitive photographic film.

Joyous in the confusion of photons passing or not passing through measured slits.

The most simple fact, the most real you, staring you in the face.

The most sacred text of the finite mind is you, staring you in the face.

You singing in the bop-swing of the most polka’d jazz of the gone sitar.

You with the skinned knuckles and the ball-bearings falling out of the race faster than you can curse.

You air-hammering in the streets while the traffic screams about pimps and pushers.

You a photograph of an undernourished kid buried under turning pages.

You a tax-schemer making deductions about the white Mercedes with the superb tits.

You an unshaven bard in a billowing tent a mile above the honest earth.

The sacred text is the wildest approximation. Approximate!