Excerpt from "A Conference of Ghosts"

The Moths and the Flame

They gathered together fluttering in the night

To decipher the truth about the candle light.

Many went and came back with news,

One about the window through which it viewed

The glow of hope, another singed its wing

Against the lips of the flame, but still they

Could not tell the nature and the abundance

Of the fire that consumes with eternal delight.

Oblation

"Your prayers are your light;

Your devotion is your strength;

Sleep is the enemy of both.

Your life is the only opportunity that life can give you.

If you ignore it, if you waste it,

You will only turn to dust."

---- Rabi'a

 

The terror that brings me to these words,

The horror and sickness I feel that words

Are not enough, the sin I make in speaking,

How can I rail against the pain without

Pain itself balling in the gut and forcing itself

through my throat? I’d fly in the wind

Slake Thirst

He always went out on yellow alert,

this cabron with the .45 snug

against the small of his back. The barrio

in decline, he'd run off thieves and junkies

in the night. We said we'd write a film

about right-wing extremists stealing

a warhead but never did. His sad corrido

Poetry, Politics and Religion

Of the primeval Priests assum'd power,

When Eternals spurn'd back his religion;
And gave him a place in the north,
Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary.

Eternals I hear your call gladly,
Dictate swift winged words, & fear not
To unfold your dark visions of torment.

-- Blake. "Urizen"

I missed a posting on William Blake's 250th birthday a few years ago. Sadly, because I cut my poetic teeth on Blake. I respected his poetry and vision so much that my second son's middle name derives from the poet. Due to a very busy schedule and some anxiety about the future, I couldn't get off the floor to say thanks to a person whose work formed much of my adolescent psyche.

Santa Fe, 1979

The Birth of Venus, Botticelli

Grotesque, in love,

spiritual, in decay,

I wrote love’s necrosis

in morse code from the grave,

love's half-shell.

Exposure

In the untracked snow

fallen since Christmas,

I pull the husky

in the child's

blue sled to the copse

of birch. He froze

in the night

after I lugged him

from the dog house

where he struggled for

the warmth that

cold and snow

Sheep Head Dog Meat

At Sam's Club, I scour the aisles for the plastic elbow

to stop the leak under the sink. It's got a thread

that winds in and out of the universal joint and fits just

right into the space it needs. Form

fulfilling function. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

People push or pull flatbed carts jammed

full with a month's worth of supplies. Pet rocks,

flatscreen TVs, choppers and grinders

fill the shelves to the ceiling.

The guts of an electromechanical paradise

complete with digital anonymity and an order

that defies death, slay, dismember, and organize

chaos into beauteous wax floors.

Wracks sail black seas

The path from lethe wreaks wraiths

path in stone wracks rage new

from stone they turned from toils

lethe wracks turned burnt red sail

wreaks rage from red ash black

wraiths new toils sail black seas

In the land of never to be...

For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night. (1 Thessalonians 5:2 NKJV)


I did not die from a drive-by shot;

I did not die in a war of evil against good.

I did not die doing deeds whose saints

win rightful awe. I did not die

with faith in my fingers and thumbs.

Sarai and Abram

Genesis 12:10-20

The book does not tell us, but she's beautiful

as she steps from the golden chair they bring

her in. The flesh of her thigh peeking beneath the sheer cloth.

Hair blue and darkened with henna. Eyes painted black.

Lips as well, and as plump as figs a man might

kill for. The gold and jewels on her arms, neck, ankles and breasts

astonish the eyes with the thought that so much wealth

is worn without a god striking you dead.

Broadway Limited, Christmas Break 1978

The dawn is malleable, a molten tree
whose rooted membrane nourishes
the passionate embrace of the clay below.

Anarchic, red, and ecstatic, the sun
escapes my brain with a desire
for fullness and the shadow of dream.

The friction and wetness of orgasm
drive me to right and wrong,
the jars of righteousness filled with an oil
that salves loss and subdues with joy.

Despair's smell is a presence startling in clarity,
as the wick in the lamp pulsates to the rhythm
of one choosing to be who one is to be.

When the film ends, and the train
of consciousness detaches from the helix,
when the flash of light and rushing sound
imprint being on cinder walls, and burn
an unforgiving sign as caress through ash.

Then the gaze that defines, the penetrating face
to face of one I do not know, questions
the silence I impose on space and time.

(c) copyright Charles David Miller. All rights reserved.

Work Psalm

Knock, and He'll open the door...Become nothing, and He'll turn you into everything. ~ Rumi

Red dawn clouds moil like blood
and promise hawk flight over Lake Superior.
Glacial crags jut into the highway
that runs past rocky lake shore
where elevators shoot grain
into ships in the harbor.
Railroad cars on the bridge
roll on tracks
from the pit where dozers climb
like ants on mountains of taconite.

Call up tohu and bohu; take axe
to the dead carcass of the day
and spread its mass at
the four ends of the earth.
Still, I am there. I the zero.
Empty cipher without name.

I seek nothing in nothingness,
not a thing to take along death’s
way like magic rock, secret chant,
or the souls of those I might
enslave to my desire to be god.

My job is a rite of belief, rote
task betokening death.
Its routine is miracle enough to praise
Maker of sky, lake, woods.
Their history mine but not mine,
their breath my last breath of holy air.

I’ll raise a cross on the
mound of my rebellion against
these days given in love and call
that name beyond names,
that love beyond love that knows
what to love and who and when;
love that rewards with no regret
but brings in its wake a tide
of days renewed and futures
unknown to augury or statistic.

Creation anew, world anew,
person anew. Known unknown.

(c) copyright 2012 Charles David Miller. All rights reserved.