Secret Book 7: Rinse and Repeat: A Religious Poem

First Revelations of Blue Heron

A voice cries out inside your wilderness,
below the surface of appliances
and tools for finer productivity,
above the arcs and citrus in your life,
and pointing out a great blue heron deep
inside the state of quarks and recreation,
it unites you in its constellation.

(Dear Skye, well as you know I’m unemployed.
Yes, that’s disheartening, but not a matter
of blood or consequence. I still retain
the main essentials, breath, Chianti, bread,
and something quintessentially quixotic,
certainly unscientific. My soul
you say? Well, that or something as biotic.)

Four hawks are busy soaring over sailboats,
interpreting the winds, defining sky
and cirrus clouds—and seriously uncertain
which direction wings will take them short-term.
But long-term, they are winging south, unaided
by anything but a universal motion.
Watching them, I sometimes get a great notion.

I believe in raw belief, the ungrown green
locomotive channeling the crash
and cymbals of Apollo, as inciting
Dionysus doesn’t die, but rises
above white pines, to rocket towards our June
of universe and native pumpkin zen—
and sit within that burnt bend of this pen.

When all right angles change to crooked lines
and every petrochemical essential
turns to sap, all roads will exit Rome.
Then Michelangelo will paint the desert
green with oak trees, white with birch trees, red
with maple trees ascending past the fall.
The choir shall chant a forest through the wall.

Walking through woods awash with end of summer
sales and inventory clearances,
I listen to the intercom inside
these Pentecostal aisles and hear the blue
light special echoing the price of life
is fine, is isinglass and isometric,
Isaac, Dorothy, Evangeline.

The branches of an ash tree turn alive
foreshadowing some presence in the woods
whose movement recreates a doe from leaves
and realization of this perfect earth,
where love instills the river with a clear
infinity of blue deliverance
beside true concentration in a deer.

Creation runs downriver, waves of vision
endlessly rolling galaxies and charm
quarks, sun and grass, Adam and Spider Woman...
We’re sitting on the riverbank, abstracted,
building castles in the sediment
—when tripping, falling in the stream, we see
the sight of hawks, or some such prophecy.

In an unseasonable understanding a lifetime ago,
I walked an equinox alone but with
one voice that guided me through solar flares
to somewhere near a weightless stone within
the waters of an oblique world, to seek
the great blue heron—who leaving me its stance,
flared time-worn wings and recommenced this dance.

The winds are waves and the dunes are waves and the sea
is waves. The clouds are waves in a sky of waves,
and seagulls are wings of waves in a world of waves.
My blood is a wave flowing from the wavelength
of my heart; my breath is a wave passing through
the waveform of my lungs. And I know my soul
is just a waver in the mystery of the whole

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