[...to whom the incarnation of...]
[...took dead bones and covered them in flesh...]
[...sprinkle upon us your sprinklings...]
From the Desert, Under Constantine [...who grow in the growth of your trees...]
[...and speaking waters touched my lips...]
[...my face received the dew...]
[...to make war by your word...]
Mamos Rotnelli
[...because they are free and they are mine...]
...translations of the cross
in which,
in the beginning was the Discourse and with God
meaning was God
You declared it good across the span of our dwelling carried in our bay
access to here obeys the tongue in Your margins alone
these pines were spoken so this sand
foam smudging the water
is prophetic speaking from the mountain’s flesh
in which,
they placed a sponge of myrrh on Your tongue a sedative to cover the source of Your words but on the cross You said no thing but ‘forgive them’ as Your blood parsed the sand reading the place of the skull and its sign and its earth as Your flesh to other places sanctified:
[Letters from my love to Lent]
this is the longing beneath the longing: throbbing
intense
in the rain
as a Christian
drawn along to wrinkled skin mossing to a waterfall, dripping
salamanders hide in the pulsing twilight
bubbling from the bark rising from worn feet, my God,
You were also anointed by a woman's hair
and You tumbled out tomb boulders
with tears
bird - dropping - bleached over cairns and egg-rocks:
a lotus-sitter facing the Atlantic there is my deity, blooming from cold spittle
a person behind her
tides and ripples
You
welcome to the life of a woman
you say
against your palm a million years of metamorphosis
the dips and turns longing like sediment
and a person blooms behind your eyes
You keep unfolding Yourself through faces drenching me in trampled spring
language poured over human aching the word itself means and spirals….
"tongue"
abstract theology writes itself up {showering off sand concealed by lilac and clapboard chipping plywood droplets baked in a green yard hose } Your truth springs from contact { bleached drift wood in the off season body brushed with grasses salt marsh and touching } } The bedrock of confession1 { undermines us,
drawing on the scent of hands
when touching is also to be touched
1
[The disclaimer, the gloss, the theological need]
The body of kenosis, the mirrored text, drawing from contemporary sources in phenomenology but also the Word becoming. See MerLeau-Ponty, the Bible, and the author's weekly taking of the host on his tongue. To speak the truth is to speak the life of things, “the body's silent conversation with the earth”, and from this contact, intuitions of divinity, which is forever news, good, the gospel, revealed from beyond us, drawing us in, making us vulnerable. We are contingent beings, humbled before our contact with creation, which prepares us for intimacy with humans, which prepares us for intimacy within the longing of the Trinity. Confession is truth, baring, embarrassed, a life split wide open, preventing abstract categories like "sin" from priding us. To potential Vatican authorities: the author wants to be a theologian some day; he confesses his shameless sensuality and hopes his poetry is taken in its proper context. That is, remembering that we all ache, and sometimes our sins are prosaically comic. Sometimes our God is prosaically touching. Sometimes our texts are prosaically tangible. Sometimes our ecstasy is prosaically salty, or wet, or sandy, or littered with psalms. But all Revelation is prosaically tongued and to witness is living in this world now and my soul is in need of real contact so I must confess God's sensual side.
lip of the orange evening my hands trail behind my back gripped by shrubs ready for their leaves
a deeper vermilion smudges the pools
the power lines spark above terraces of water seeping beavers and muskrats, piles of twigs, and white petals chewed below
the iron in my forehead: ochre veins, cruciform
the cedar hash of the soil sponges up the forest flanks and pulls me forward -
desires, multiple, replaced with Desire, One
You are the paraclete burning before the train trackstwo eyes, the vagueness of a nose
with taunts of crickets and spring peepers, the lanterns simmer into periphery
and spark in the dusk like Pacific globes
body surfing
from the rough sand, grating against the plane of escalation, the foam rushing up the angle of the drop-off point heaving in Plum Island's saturated air i'm thrown with the drift of shipwrecked shelter my palms tender, scraped to blood shielding my face
gray over the salt whip, arms scourged, helpless in the wind-water tear toes clinging the riptide vestige of sylvan security
curled, rolled, head ground, and looking
spreading my body to the next surrender
Lord, can I reach your hands?
when mine smell of salt
of algae and grass stains fern spores and cat fur greased ions woodsmoke
pine snow and deep hair
shower water
leaf veins
and other hands
spring sweat
Your hands smell of
crossblood
fish
bread
wine
water and deity
[letters to the manna collectors]
…translations of the cross
we know that,
faith springs from contact sandy
like the monks who trained their flesh
with pinecones and terns in the shadow of the city:
to speak without tongues
multiple, multiple ways of the cross multiple ways will be spoken…
falling silence snowed into a desert’s breast shoulders graced and bared new particles caught in our hair (tracks, opening to spring dunes of an anchorite’s nape:
risen
mist over the mountain cut winds the inverse of spruces
old skids and flooded tracks new ferns and rediscovered “Hail Marys”
hidden seas collect in the pulp of lady slippers
and below the falls dendrite tricklespocked explosions, river foam, a mandala of mica pebbles.
splendor
his head is full of tongue pange lingua gloriosi giving birth to wind that fragile organ midwifes the stream: pneuma punctuate politics pangs ‘the awesome birth of vociferation’ chance lets us touch at the sanctum sanctorum rent like the veil at the hour of mercy wet in our hands their nets
the neurons
splayed the arbor vitae reptilian histories the tree of life at the tip of that membrane is ethics the globular tree of known Good and Evil and calls relentlessly for manifestations: “bodies we need…. bodies show power how many bodies can your people turn out?” wanting their skin, its color, perhaps its wrinkles in youth and at times its gendered places to network the hands touching color in our torsos, network the feet over patinas and seismic, network the retinals and lymphs and the onta. onta. when placed into contact from the mingled ingraced beyond the hum of sparked intervention, its whole will leave us the residue of inquiry the factual presence of other bodies, we touched by our touching
Fragments of Seasons
1. gulping purse of mud, a crescent crimson flower advent guards this thorny turn in miles of flooded river loops
2. no sparrows yetsunlight streaming through incense evaporated ginger tea you look up from your text
3. beneath the crabapple’s protection a crate covered a burlap cloth a bowl of snow a vase of daisies lips of august our knives were mindful melting into the wheat
4. wet summer earlya broken crab blue blood pooling on the sandy planks the boardwalk cleared by a teenage worker
writing poetry
whitewater, rushing neurons from behind my ears to the pen-
etched absence
leaving damp traces
like shadowstendrils of moss that beard the falls
below the prickerbush beleaguered with Styrofoam, trees arthritic to my eyes
droplets fire at the nape of my neck the cold draft of rain and responsibility
but spring comes earlier to Ipswich Bay
where the stands of dunegrass tend
drawn now
seaward by wraiths of sand, my mind
on the plain
they simmer
the seasonal salvage
splotched purple and green
along the bare
a slide of long, slow streaks
drawn down sacral,
veiling its own resonance
dipping towards blue
leaving sluices of waterdust doused at the rocks where the rainbow might open
traces
and scratches on the steel, the academic graffiti. nothing but red lights, and bringing. hunger, electric in the high cold, warding off planes. satire in society, a circus of the mind in motion. controls laughter. inventing the barbarian.
after the punks – fists into the fog between buildings. after the ministers gathered with candles. upon dispersing, we saw the drop of an entity. a bloodied wing, austerity of bone exposed. the holy dove? mangled through a turbine. on March 20th, 2003.
warm water from the lamplight; 30 feet from the bureaucratic steam. chambers, peering. in calm, showering off the sediments. 30 feet below the cultural. gloss and the bar. holding myself. as cocoons unraveling.
replayed with the greatest hints. of organs. generational anxiety, sedimented over backbeats. their magazines were fashioned to the turning link. having no marshes to pray in. as somewhere the soil turned over. movements, past. their residue. with youth. the first sun of march on the streets.
electric gray behind the fleet’s imperial home. buildings, figured, and flying tortures. simplicity, framed: the identical dryers. fearing blood against the white. histories of entities reduced.
3 drops of red wax on newly produced stairs. our vigils have punctuated time. with the language of candles. history on slate.
un-notched cedars. shadowing the folded arms of St. Francis. walking the streets as gathered beasts. dirty snow will give way to mulch, and a stain of white paint on the brick above it. someone’s art carves his territory. behind a birdfeeder. two men quarrel upon leaving the chapel. a drop of holy water runs down my finger. does the Eucharist warm them in the fog?
from Tacitus, annals: “again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but also in the City, where all things hideous and shameful meet and become popular.” a communist waddles through the busy market. intently chipping, a white-shirted person looks up from frames in the process of earning. a cross of sticks, jammed into the park bench.
hands holding wine, bottled red. his nose in the Portuguese sunlight. a worker pressed against the glass, carrying it. while flags are caught in the pine branches, the Eucharist rests in me.
reflections of women in late antiquity, carved in protected wood: a public’s garden. feathers in the cedar chips.
curtains above the green. from behind them, tongues glancing. later streetsides. punctuated with cedars. refugia. they scatter their voices, chirping the passing subwoofer. auburn. cream white. like melting snow, they dodge. phosphorous on the chimney brick. while the moon hints. over afternoon orange. when roofs will sizzle. in the season announced.
...translations of the cross
it has been said that,
all the great teachers left texts Yours was only wine and the water that flowed from Your body the Discourse embodied which all tongues can drink perceiving the tender care of judgment: the measure spoken of all our relations of Yours to the Godhead phrased by the cross and all flesh shall see it together
(and sand, via words, shall return unto sand)
and unto you,
from it
the tributaries of water gather bloodied and vision-drenched as the cross articulates the flesh...
[love letters, never a-historical]
from the sand many tongues have spoken
like chant from an urban chapel
broken from November with failed politics we just sat near the purple canopy of wicker , brick second floor Dickens smokestacks
clanking walls heating the vault suspended in a Providence sky
we just sat our faces to the glow our two bodies circled ‘round an advent wreath our hands held in dona nobis pacem
against the flickering schism of continental transcripts
our candle-fields conjoined
the nearby Zen chanting
to my love
why you can't be other
and when you rolled over I sighed when I heard your torso sloshing under my ear all I know is we love
each other
just keep their ideas away from our bodies
rosemary thyme balsam crushed encrusted under cart wheels on the feast of Corpus Christi
ritually
even if the Song of Songs were a peasant ballad sung at weddings
this would be resurgence in our flesh last, most difficult, distant beyond the signs of Independenzia
these would be the best of a letter to you i never saw out a narrow green stretch
beyond the painted clefts of seclusionary cliffs dipping your breasts with sea and sweat dripping your salt under arbor walls, their hanging grapes that's how you became a relic of Bizkaia
about a woman
furrows of black snow in a Chinatown parade-field steam and lanterns where old world incense reclaims Boston’s
inside
our bodies
star-thin air
softer
polyglot
you speak of family we’re sharing this soup pulling these strands into mosaic
a fluttering monogamy yearns to rise out the cracks of our incomprehension -
learns to give like cleaved sesame
we say grace
to a polyamorous God in absolute fidelity-
we say many things
about a man
the neonate of oceans past has grown up into us and the atman he spoke of rich enough to transgress our somatic memory babbling to the colors within the colors and laughing at surfaces: his, mine left me wishing I could understand the Farsi what he wanted to be was only a fierce ancient and universal love scriptures splashed into fountains the boundaries faded into forests of wet ink
meditation on the dirty kitchen floor: he thought I was holding the Christ Child he pictured me as Mary
the neonate of oceans plastered, it molded into the flame of God behind his laughter, and I was drawn out of maya, babbling lightly, into the confession of the joke.
and he taught me first to long for God
if he was serious about God being in himself then he taught me to long for him too
about God
hiding my face in a bathroom stall, or with a finger tracing scripture one foot on a geologic marker, mud on a hill over scrawny branches the asperities will crumble, the thin film of explanations broken and You shock down my arms, and fire out my eyes i disregard my reflection and see You instead in the atomic pits and grains of the mineral glass You toss me above my bed floor
and the rosary falls to the
and i land broken and gasping the sweet calm of all distraction prayer useless the words burned out
33
....translations of the cross
in which, touched by our slaughters You suffered therein the Word became flesh and dwelt among us a new body spoken as Mary said ‘be it done unto me’ with the Holy Spirit conceiving by tongue her voice of dethronement… mountains ground into sand
we pray to her now as the star of the sea with arms like the dunes, cradling water whole now and holy we have time to cross
[First Letters from America to the Romans]
34
welcome broken
textual stream
i found your flayed body seeping covered in mud and wine dye
i spotted it from open cellars garden hills of a public estate
i thought i saw the Merrimac silted back from cataracts
your river in textile shadows, your humbled crumbling smokestacks
return bald eagles with arsenic eyes
35
inauguration in the metropole
their suits in the seaport air shouting in radio silence
snow falls over the forum they contemplate duty
their flag cuts into the banks down and down like steaming urine
a fringe of blood on their lapels
36 the daughter of Wendell Berry’s neighbor
with painted eyes out of Kentucky she clenches her wine she speaks of Sao Paulo, Paris,
home…
embarrassed by the illiterate Nazi in Berea ‘cause public libraries carried Mein Kampf and a white farmwife could read it to himbut her own father, who in New York found Mr. Berry in rooms where young intellectuals converted themselves to the reclamation of dairy farmsthe strongest bond she ever felt: countercult and heartland married but laterlater they divorced
a cosmos now of tangential fidelity once more we’re drinking in the urban Northeast, a Japanese restaurant laughing with many accents the cheap wine recalls also her drawl a table in the crampt hall salty smiling people with manifold cheeks pressed bare shoulders and multiple passports massed in each other’s laps forgetting
ways to make sense with her our loss of villages
37
38 of the hours
[ morning prayer
scratches of early bird calls, squeaky wheels of an emptying dumpster our flyers getting ripped by enemies from the arch below
then we sit, lovers, and waittipping before the tabernacle in this chapel above the green
incanted sighs in morning coffee, a 50s state of mind waiting tables for it all to begin again
…when it finally comes it will come against…
that flag-only place the historical world serves i am but the demi-urge the midwife of this stream
39 [if
It ever happens again]
six decades full of spring evenings where the flock of barn swallows returns left as droppings
on ‘30s tractors, telephone cables shadowed hay and dusty posters
i was a child playing in this mess of the great depression when our landlord wasn’t dead yetwhen these gears were first made useless
unlike their marked returns our banknotes had their moodswings this pile of junk recalls its obsolescence
in how we rigged in the shadow of their flight and the rain of nests
a means to restart the machinery
40 under the branches of apple and crabapple Jenny and I squelched our hands into the grassy mud and silky water where the old stone wall divided our yards and spat a spring through its holes we could dam the upper field could flood the dandelions and keep away the bees
with lambs jumping and wild grapes ripening it was a pastoral childhood
one day Jenny and I dug behind the stone wall and found the spring was a sewer pipe broken neglected by our landlord Jenny's mother - a stripper down Route 1would scold her for coming home late smelling like urine soaked grass
41
week without solitude
scuttling in the dormitory bathroom could it be a wharf rat nosing the weekend’s littered toilet paper?
could it be 1917 nipping the heels, Hudson mud on my great-grandmother’s Italian shoes?
trying to fall asleep
i know those strikes had texture each one of you shot down every one imprisoned for a notch in the bending iron but now a thousand pages assail me with only one question:
a bat fluttering against my eyes
42
sun on the hill up by the asylum where Ingraham tree farm
off a colonial farmhouse paint chips fall lead white
shines like plastic in the bare birches
into the mud
cobwebs and trophies line its windows curtaining a room where an obese woman lies in a shirt tuned blue by television light she folds her hands in her varicose thighs
outside the rising of newer streams washes the roadside vodka bottles
now in the ditches last year’s salamanders lay the gel of this year’s eggs into the uteri of skunk cabbage
43
44
as a child inside the statue of liberty i smelled electricity for the first time
when i saw the generator that powers the elevators
who gets to turn it off and back on?
45
“with so many hotels crowding us out, the price of dock space is skyrocketing…. a man treads aboard, northbound from Newport in the orange light his hairy chest open over spackled pants with the tools he carries home “used to be you could make a living on quahogs… had my own boat…. the bus breathes up Aquidneck Island like an open deck rig in late July the residues of breezes on public seats carry the chatter of Saturday beachgoers and afternoon workers “had to give it up a long time ago…. doin’ this now…” clutching his tools, he seems to dread the next stop where matters will flatten the suburb where the beachgoers disembark and everyone else, exhausted from the day will leave him the only one speaking so he takes out his daughter's library book and reads himself haikus about fishing and he looks up tensely at the uniformed workers from Dunkin’ Donuts flashing their passes at 7:30 as the ocean exhales its last light through lanes of hissing corn and the breezes slowly reverse themselves
46
[to Origen2 and other heretics]
I don’t know why you abandoned these placesstrikes could spread here but you didn't come until the bosses had fled the empty Providence factories you anarchists3 became new anchorites4 entombed in hives like Saharan outposts battling the memories of demons still feeding on incense rising from the stacks and every time you burn, you’re keeping them alive
2
Origen, a scholar in the Early Church later condemned as a heretic judged that Christians should not smoke incense the pagan deities are really demons you know they feed off the smoke so when you drop a pinch of incense offering at the foot of the emperor's altar you are keeping that demon alive
3
In Providence, Rhode Island factories notoriously empty of radicals filled with anarchists camping out there only after the factories went under
4
anchorites were Christian hermits in the deserts of ancient Egypt and Syria they anchored themselves to places like abandoned imperial fortresses
47
even in distant mangrove swamps, the suck, the flap of squashed ripples
flutters at the edge of radicalia
an outflow, a culvert, a draft: workers pulled to the veins
aloud through the labor-ready. a truck dusts over the Florida bypassoil, purple on the Gulf
in Middle America, a thousand radishes bloom as a woman edges dirt off the red flesh in a basin of fingers pressed she unroots the knot of organized sinews and wraps it, swaddling, in an open bandanna
may we divert production towards mercy like the spice at the heart of the root
48
[Letters to the martyrs from an era begun]
...translations of the cross
therein we,
come to challenge the ways of the flesh ‘presente’ sacrificed bodies; we ask for nothing but air land and water a chance to forge plowshares ‘as it has been spoken’ we ask for no thing but to lie together in this sand Your touch to open every tongue
49
and I saw the empire sleeping there blue in janissary sunset
tipping off the edge the horizon's bloodied mange
while down the dome we witnessed
in woven fury
her actional breathing
your vantage has become systolic in our common tide
a rising silent
siege of alternatives
and from below you waged
50
commence the fifth international
we cut our fingers on the etched marble pinning red dots to the map
51 [fragments from the censored autobiography of a young Christian
1982
carried in water
1983
bald tuft
1984
forgotten cockroaches
over Anasquam bridges
wrapped in wind on Plum Island chimney fires
1985
yellow lined paper from his anarchist school
1986
radiation in Russia
1987 1988 1989
1990
1991
1992
]
we dug in oil slick sand
I feared the domes my mother’s water broke for my sister
and we built town meetings
from brushfire and logs
sewage in the basement strung up sheepdogs my father coughed mashing grapes in a dog bowl pebbles for currency
[mortar and pestle]
ashamed suddenly of fireshacks and having a landlord
sheepdog shit on the lawn
others had computer games, I had the goat pen
1993
writing utopias
1994
their boy scout tribalism still timid conscience
1995
would catch in images
1996
body surfing is like grace when I surrender
1997
aching from the grass stains on her white tank top multiplicity
her
1998
salved by snow on Mt Lincoln
below
1999
they shoved me off the snowbanks echoes of fascism
my
escape to the rocks off Halibut Point you can’t fight it angelic host armies still propel me
his suicidal
the Eucharist reemerged then as pantheistic maple leaves
52 2000 2001 2002 2003
2004 2005
Moby Dick vortices
a wolf in the blizzard
meditating on the kitchen floor
he saw me as the Virgin Mary
the Eucharist re-emerged as the body of Christ peeling tomatoes with our tongues struggle these salty hands
she prepared us for
weight to fell Constantine
now I’m willing to shoot with my words
53
manifesto:
this is how it begins a dispatch from the underground He doused drops of holy water onto the tipping point
stoked broken divulged the tomb boulders rolled He said, “I go before you to Galilee”
54 Intifada trans. Exodus
everyone wants to be liberated Israel; nobody wants to be Pharaoh Tel Aviv tried to copyright the Exodus while from corrugated pink shacks in Antigua Jamaica and Haiti they also sing of Zion
as Qur'anic scholars and dreadlocked prophets arrive in Jerusalem to demonstrate that Pharaoh is everywhere and every ghetto is full of Moses 400 years, 400 years... Ethiopia, Palestine, Jamaica, Brooklyn, he judges all nations and those in exile become his chosen people
55 to reach for a common end, sisters
enough what made enough to drop their worknets into
fishers of men
this world of slippery purposes where anyone convicted is suspect
You made me also wanting to be the fingers of a small body bounded
who can give our twice-born lives watching your telos unfold in our efforts
56 St. Antony of the wilderness, we fear your intercession
your flight to the desert abandoned the imperium its gospelic gloss over septic old practices 'Christian' blessings over tax riot slaughters where Constantine's faith was all incense and gold
you struck for indifference blank yellow stones parched eyes
and liquefied prayer
raking malnutrition from Saharan grace
you were a human once
lacerated with visions
in which, teach us to flee
(what can the legions and bishops do? Constantine is found at a loss for words threaten to exile? monks rest in exodus threaten with poverty? monks live on husks of bread, brackish water threaten to execute? monks are already climbing the cross oh, believers made dangerous! having absolutely nothing nothing to loose if Christian emperors only knew the power of apophatic prayer they would ban fasting and mandate feeding tubes)
57
they found the modern age was sharp and steel white on vacuum
which gave them the urge to deconstruct:
- but it only softened the edge like a scream into static
.I will deconstruct
only in failing in parsing the swamp decomposed
layers of maple acid mellowing below the scatter, the ponds congealed soft with the bloom of death.
algae fertile, fungus kneading the crumbling cities of termites rebuilding trunks felled by the seasons, their home becoming a moist putty yielding soon the upward suck of roots and new life
58 Letter to the Reader (beginning the commentary....
And an orthodox teaching? Tertullian, the Church Father said that a Christian Emperor is an oxymoron. Amen, Amen, Christ said to us. His Word never meant to justify Rome. Yet we took it in stride, with text machinations, and now Constantine is reading from the Christian throne. Before Jesus, gospels were imperial proclamations - scrolled letters - dispatches from on high. Caesar thought he himself was the Son of God and he would send to the provinces: "Gospel: we conquered new tributaries." Jesus died to change all this with his subversive good news. 'Son of God' was the messianic savior of a colonized people. And so the Christian story begins with "The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." 5 The gospel of a peasant in the middle of land torn by guerilla warfare. The Early Christians, skirting the legions of the Roman Empire, sent each other letters from this underground. Their federated churches, sometimes burned, leave us traces of texts, epistles and liturgies, stories and gospels. Words on their scrolls would proceed straight across the page. After ages, spaces would open up from mold and moth, water and desert sun, and new linguistic forms. And now the task of interpretation: does this word "logos" read with the word on its right or the word on its left? How to interpret the spaces of historical caesura? Entire schools of theology were made or broken based on such choices. With the rise of Constantine, the fate of an empire rested on unanimous interpretation, monolithic government. The spaces in the text, the lack of punctuation were breaches of national security. The only ones open to interpretation were the lunatic monks of Egypt and Syria, those who rejected Constantine's sword. The Desert Fathers and Mothers, led in the scorching, "Give us a Word, Abba." But the poems of centuries opened by the spaces. These poems opened by history, and the face of the text as a physical object, decomposable in the desert sun. Poetry as a deeper form for theology, where the Word can go both ways at once.
These poems, like the Early Christian letters, are fragmentary and hopeful. Unlike Paul, we live under Christian Emperors.
We're praying for what the faith will become when Constantine falls once and for all.
5
Mark 1: 1-11.
59
Special thanks to C.D Wright, Forrest Gander, and Catherine Imbriglio, my writing mentors, and to my fellow students in workshop.
And to my comrades Matt, Chris, Gina, Senia, Dara, Anthony, Shemon, Lauren, Aaron, Veronica, Jamusa, and Brian. Those who fought Constantine for more than poetry but used poetry in the struggle. To my love, Jane Mee, our letters becoming.
To all post-Constantinian Christians.
To people of every faith who are praying now for the final fall of the Roman Empire.
60 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/4.0/.
