The Venetian Mirror

 

The Venetian Mirror

The sins of us—a round blue eye through your soft dark hair found you soft-lipped and smiling in your sleep. A country music station played quietly in the window while I dreamed through waves and bottles of wine of you. Of the Winter I spent lost searching for God in the streets of Heidelberg. I went bare there, an exploding silent nebulae crouching under old castle stairs (and even then there was a glass of wine in my hand!) searching for a God I did not understand. Like the night I threw pages down the side of a mountain near my mother’s home—I was sick and laughing all the time at the God I knew was watching me. All those nights as cold as when I lay near you and wondered of the lava movement of your chest—O Holy Holy beast, while you sleep do you dream the sins of me there?

My nobility disgusts me—the inborn eye of my mother sees sterily thin-ribbed kids that prod the hearts and minds of all the world’s saints. Blood red mice eat their big liveley eyes and I as a fool am only distracted by the weight of my clothes when lying next to you. Distracted by my love and bowed down before you laughing at my weaknesses. You know nothing of the nobleman who sleeps in the midst of coition and your fertile blood. You have no idea the necessary filth of nobility.

Nights I have slept alone chained like the Divine Marquis to my own sinking chest. There the Pope dreams he’s a saint with keys to absolute possession—Sappho flies from Lesbos to Paris to press lips that should be singing on the cold stone of Oscar Wilde’s grave—Jews in Bismarck smile eastward sometimes, thinking of grandfathers—cabaret dancers sleep lightly in oval beds—Sweet Marie pours red kisses down my throat and asks how I could ever be the same when all I asked was where I could find you. And now I only wish to sleep soundly through nights I sleep alone.

But you know I never sleep—I lay in those beds alone and stare into black rooms and dream of plagues and dying. I long for orchestrated catastrophes. Marching men and idle minds, a thousand birds in ordered lines, infinite depths across noonday April skies. Trees planted in rows and ecology mechanized. Ballroom dances and eyes interlocked. Order. The ritual of marriage ceremonies and the vulgar passion of the bed. Children at play, and the layout of the dinner table. Whispering women. Schools of fish making smooth and sudden movements. The passing of clouds and turning leaves in the fall; the simultaneous uprising of flowers in spring. Turning pages in books and rivers of cars. Black piano keys under the fingers of Chopin. The sweeping panorama of a valley; naked men and women atop mountains. Marching men and cadences. Crucifixions multiplied. All the world's eyes blinking in unison. And sometimes I dream of bibles.

I imagine new republics and the flight out of Egypt. The architectural paintings of Adolf Hitler. Migrations and returnings. Trees blooming one color at a time: white, orange, then green. The ocean and its eternal pulsation and the rain that falls into it. Hermetic circles and wars. Archetypes. Dolls. Christ in the Garden, or being tempted by the lights of the cities below. Sex and Dionysian rampages: blood, sand and the sea. Ballets and operatic choruses multiplied ninefold and performed by children in yellow fields. Footsteps making crop circles. Churches burning and prayers before altars. I dream I dream I dream. Sweeping floods and landslides, volcanic eruptions. Lands never conquered. Idle queens and sadistic courtyard games. Alice in Wonderland and beer in the ditch. Dancing to old music, violins, guitars and wooden frums. Scars on the sides of necks and stories of war, and wives, and swings in back yards. But mainly I dream about nonsense, and that's as close as I ever get to God.

I know knowledge of God comes naturally, plainly—but faith comes only in hindsight. It all does seem silly—Everywhere!

Everything!

The Fire Sermon.

Yet I always believed in you, gentle girl, when we lay wrapped in your soft sheets (linen bedclothes dance unseen, hanging on a line in a windy north georgia field).

***

I’ve hung around dirty bars where all your dreams are smitten down—O celestial One! Why are we always guilty?

I’ve seen Sappho ride chariots over the earth, tantalizing laughing and singing, flying in a satin dress. For her passing butterflies will renounce their faces. I’ve encountered gentle folk in lands that I know. I’ve watched daughters multiply, my daughters. Priests will say unto them: Thou shalt not want at any time, bury therefore thy womb. I am truly lost, and thee? I shout:

THOU SHALT NOT, OLD ROME!

THE NECKAR YIELDS OLD VOLUMES—LUTHERS AND NIETZCHES

SHAKE THEIR ICY FACES

I’ve gone with men of these dusty old volumes who shake their snowy heads and with eyes bowed go slowly for the fountains of alcohol. They flow and splash beneath unseen seraphs who dance to Sapphic melodies. My son will someday laugh through that crowded air, for how could a son ever be unlike his snowy father?

O but the poor truth: everything I've ever done I've done basely. I was dead and had been for a long time until the necromancy of love, a song from a scarlet dressed woman dancing through a godless churchyard came to me. It was you that danced and I was troubled. I could think only of the word of God: they chant to the sound of the viol, and invent to themselves instruments of music, like David.

***

And I find myself now a prisoner of the singing law. I was born in the Christian city but of silver chaos. I sing under the torture of this law so that no one will understand my moral outcry--in a sense I am a child of the streets, a brute, and those making wine for me are making a terrible mistake.

You see, I know myself no more than I know the dead buried and dancing in my sick buddha belly. I sense the martyrs and the fatality of Jesus in country gardens—saints among the flowers—hey talk there—travelers and their horses prance beside them. I witness and laugh in glory and out of reason, and to the soundless music of divine winter nights. To the melodies of freezing angels I sing, looking up to a sky drunk with the blood and all the useless labor of the saints.

Like Sappho I too have watched gentle girls dancing. I saw them in an Appalachian meadow through the eyes of Rimbaud’s hare. I laid down in a ditch on the side of the road, drunk, and prayed through a spider web. I trembled, not knowing which to pray to, the dancers or the web. Would you laugh if I said my soul was burning? Laughing now, I do love you. The solemnity of god and his thousand voices condemn me too often, saying: “Behold! Here is the mirror before which you are unworthy to stand! Here is the mountain upon whose peak can be heard that mighty echo; climb if you will, fool!” But see out there the Dome of the Rock? I don't care about it. See the paintings of Blessed Mary? They can burn. See in days to come the Jew’s temple rebuilt? It can fall again. And when you laugh at me I cannot help but return your humor, and in humor God falls.

Once I cursed and wept for the futility of spring flowers, November’s memory and my children’s summertime play. Later, I called out to dark heaven for but a glimpse into that hall of mirrors. O to conquer life under a banner of sanctity! But I’ve forsaken it all--Look! From where you are can you see this half moon charging over the sky? Impatient in jailhouse raging stillness just as I lay here with dead leaves in my head—don’t you know I could crawl across this abyss of night? Even across the abyss of life for the melody of your sighs. You can sing away monuments girl and like a light on a river I know I can dance.

Yet amid those starflowers and gods fallen from heaven I really do belong, and to think I was given a key to that kingdom by a strange German I once knew. Shadows hang from the worn-out panes of my room but on the wall I have a rose-colored Venetian mirror I found in the Black Forest (nobody knows, most think it’s a plain mirror). Deep like night I can see into it, past myself, into a land of ponds with bathing women. I smile at the nude phantoms in the hazy distance. I gaze for a long time from the dark comfort of my armchair and think of God sitting quietly upon my chest of drawers, of the forehead beneath my hand, of things I am unable to find, or understand—of you, and of what your love is. I see bluebirds flying there. I see today fading away and daydream of the tunes dark-haired women sing when they’re alone, of the quivering flanks of horses arrayed for battle—