24th of November

Listening all day long an amateur recording

Of Leaves of Grass

Female, matured voice

Serene, kind and motherly

Reading for nineteen hours straight

Words enshrouding young bodies

Stout, handsome soldiers, forsaken

Left behind at the battlefields of yore

The Maccabees of Alamo

Old honorable Quakers

Patriarchs with their herds, radiating vitality

Tanned bearded men of twenty-seven

Swimming in ponds

Like Solomons of old

With scented garments

Infusing their bodies with perfumes

With sandalwood, and ointments

And myrrh and hyssop

Old Testament men

Brave, tall, hearty, handsome

Smelling like Esau the hunter

The fragrance of the fields, and grass and dew

Like Gedeons of old

Men who fascinated God and angels

.......................................................

These songs, Roman collects of youth

And sunshine, and laughter

And wilderness

Glassy fragments of dusks and dawns

Fine faces, drops, bellies, curled chest-hair, loins

the laughter of young friends

Preserved on  ancient wax cylinders

From centuries ago

Crackling, distorted

Ripe with Purgatories of

 Murmuring, interfering spirits

Entrapped ghosts speaking with an echo-

Lovers, long dead

Enfolded in soil, mute, separated now

In recesses of the earth

Delivered to God's final judgment

Living in truth  at last

The soil so full of useless memory

.........................................................................

Faces of ancestors-warriors,

Healing me from my shame,

Teaching me to accept my body

Speaking softly but firmly

With their hundred years old oak-voices

Lale and Drekale

Noahs and Abrahams of old wars

Blessed by Melchidesedeks the patriarchs

John of Peć, hieromartyr

And Ruvim, Cherub of Montenegro, anointing

Near the stream

Savage brave, wild wild wild men

Archbishop and High-priest

Ancestors in Morača, attending councils

Among prophets and angels with firm faces

Attendants infused with the strong aroma of incense and lambskin

Men with sabers invigorated in blood and fire, battling near Dečani

Where the king of the old days lays intact, fragrant

waiting to burst up from his Marble grave with fiery sparks

(This is my version of Milco Mancevski's The Dust)

Their tales of battles and catastrophes

In old photographs, pale and stern Ahabs

With that expression on their faces -

As if they managed to see through all these centuries

To return my glance

Aghast by this new vision,

Frozen forever in this all-encompassing stare

Or maybe - as if the very photographs suffered

A certain change after their death

Giving them this new perspective

The long lingering surprise

The great ahhhhhhhhhh

Like the last breath of a hermit seeing

Stirred honeycombs of angels and righteous-ones

The New Jerusalem

Unfathomable, white, consuming

In a minute, frozen revelation

................................................................

Grass scent, wine scent

Old kings and heroes

Robust

The strong-bodied forefathers

With their abiding vitality

The wine cups and strong thighs of forefathers

Pregnant with nations and cities

With kings to be and poets

Their tents in green pastures

Their herds with strong limbs and muscles

Something of it still beating in my worn-out body

Their sensuality and strength in me also

(for I never denied myself anything,

Never learned to submit to puritan rigidity

To want something but not to have it

By a pure act of the will

Due to some moral firmness

And rigor,

To comply with strong principles,

I, very sensual,

Permanently in love

Ready to go to the very bottom

Tender, loving, drunk, celibate)

The laughter of ancestors encircling the hearth

As if infusing the fire with a better life

Singers of tales with their Christmas fasts, vigils, and prayers

Semi-Christianized mores

Their pious ejaculations

Uttered  during hard labor and childbirth

Formed am I by these utterances also

There's something of it in me too

Of those ejaculations and songs

Something in me from the drops of their wine

Of their acceptance of life and strength

They, but wearied by history, in me

..........................................................................

The scented wine of psalms and hearty benedictions

Fair-bodied warriors and wise kings

And blind sages, an army with many and many spears

Enamored, enchanted by this

Kings leaping, dancing among their people

Babes suckling, singing lauds

Matrons and girls

And altars of the Lord most high

In pastures, in saturated fields

Winter with pale fires

Near Bethlehem

With Jesse and Samuel

And chosen champions of Israel

Conferring with each other

Old and wise

Deliberations of the seers and prophets

Overthrown rocks as altars

With burning offerings and libations to the Lord

Most High, upon the Armies

Angel, a strong one, with a staff

Producing a consuming fire

His face hidden under the hud

Just a firm jaw

speaking to Gedeon

In a quiet, manly voice

Voice of the one incapable to be surprised

By a manifold of events

Firm voice, but placid also

And David – able one

with a sword and spear and sling

A voice of a matriarch

Caressing Jacob her son on her lap

A pageant of events and frescos

.......................................................................

Walt Whitman, what is the most important thing about Christ?

_______  that He is beautiful.

Yes, this is the Autumn where Christ dwells

You're right  - as Emily Dickinson begins

To imagine a life of a Calvinist divine -

There is a beauty in it, unappreciated by many still

To have  your own broadcast on some Southern station

A Call for Anguish

Speaking in soft, burdened, worrisome voice

Using expressions like a season of grief

Almost tearful sound and utter silence in a place

From where you speak

(In a red cloudy sunset, in an abandonment of highways

Where velocity becomes something still, preoccupied)

And afterward dining in a large house of a bygone era

Where light is dim    

The electricity dulled to utter degree

With wearied old wires

And looking at your plate

With beef and mash potatoes

Closing your eyes

With conservative demeanor

Sitting there in suspenders

Saying Grace in utter silence

With a large mute family

Holding hands congregation-like

A Cry for Anguish

A bulb in general urgency

Eating sticky mass

Digesting words of Scripture

Alarming words

Sitting there in the bulb of a home

Shivering under your sheets

It's a place of security, still

Only from this perspective of anguish

You can see the world as it is

To perceive those inter-city tunnels

With filthy dark yellow lights,

Underpasses, parks,

People returning home at 4 am

In sterile light of buses

Third shifters, people 'unsaved'

Drunkards, folks wearied by daily labor

So that all this can became a part

Of a still larger Autumn

And the soundtrack of it

Is this scripture flavored, a closeted voice of grief

With archaic names and words from long ago

Words full of shattered glass

And large buildings outside, skyscrapers illuminated from within

With hundred moth lives furnished with sterile kitchens

And minimalist Donald Jud bedrooms

And white suburban houses also

From this anguish only

You can fall in love with the world

But not as if it is something grand

And accomplished, distinguished and bright

But as something so painful,

Tortured, and desolate

Feeble, decrepit from the vileness of life

From booze and pills

Wantonness and dissipation

And capitalism

To love something so painfully caged

In squared small offices

Utterly lost

Like in a maze of some queequeg's

Heathenish tattoo

There has to be some puritan rigidity first

For the world to attain its sad and dilapidated beauty

And you are a lover, desiring to hug all of it

but maybe due to some instruction and upbringing

unable to find the right words of compassion too

letting it all, this care, transfigure unintentionally

into some clumsy and angry condemnation

But it's not so ------

-Like Sarah from Parker's Back, you say.

You are right, you are still speaking

Clumpsy words of censure

As someone who is also himself

Damaged, shattered,

But as if from a different angle,

To see the beauty in things shattered

You must first see this in yourself,

This burning autumnal rage:

To be touched by fiery fingers of  a great Fall

Like tawny, honeyed forests entering lasting gloom of wintery decay

You have to have it yourself (but may be of a different kind)

So that your dark light can illuminate this same thing in others

But you never learn the language of sympathy

Maybe due to some instruction and upbringing,

You never succeed in expressing this thing in the right manner

As if you are sentenced to a well-learned language

An idiom of repeated phrases

Which you know yourself to be too rigid and phony

But there is something in you that can still

Perceive this solemn beauty in desolation

A fiery Autumn in everyone you encounter

Yes, this is the Autumn where Christ dwells

You can enter this great Fall-through

Maybe in Amsterdam or in some other big city

In some  long-neglected self-decay

In your escape from everything

In a desire to live on your own

In this great demise

Falling through rotten boards

In the furnace of loneliness

To Kingdom of Fiery Autumn

Where 'Christ of the burnt men' awaits.