theNakedAtheist

The first Sunday
after the first full moon
after the first equinox of the year,
rise early and lean outside
in the spiced air, listen to the bells ringing.
Morning bells,
bells of the far churches
chuckling their delight for the advent of another spring
in a world that has dawned.

Easter
and already the snows have grown weary;
they drop their coats
and troop back into the darkness.
Already the gale, brabbling wind
discards his piercing shrillness
and his iciness;
he bounds forward on us warm and naked.
Already the distant sun, long aloof
forgets herself,
wanders our way, smiling broadly.
Already the crocuses and daffodils,
the jonquils, the dogwoods, the wisteria, even the white iris
alone in the field by my house,
cast off their shyness; vulnerably
expose themselves before the world,
unprotected and beautiful.

And it is spring. It is spring.
I look beyond the empty lot, out past
the steeples that stand like toys on the far street; suddenly
I see earth supple before me like a gardener
like a mother suckling rich seedmouths

and they spring up.

They spring up, they spring up
in eudicotyledon splendor of living,
resurrected in body once again.

Sun is a flight of photons
pelting me in the morning
entering the soul of my body
in photonic penetration.

Gold little embers
enter me through the fingers
through the weak frailty of my arms
cocked before me.

How should I know what the secret of life is
when it is only embers
even the sun’s little embers
come to me by these arms?

That day
when spring is come
and birds blow song,
when wind is blue
and sun stirs up
thrashing about till cold be gone

and buds peek forward
from the womb of the tree
raising their heads like flowers to the air,
while black flies buzz black with
the quick lust of the bee
and butterflies
flair
with their certain, butterfly flair

and ants spin hotly
out their cave-doors in the ground
searching new food
and dragonflies wake soft,
wee in the silence of the morn
beyond the winter-death of sound,

that day, I’ll prance to you
out the early light
and we’ll make our bed
until it is night.

Sit then, we shall make a nest
and I shall clutch you, my lips impress
a dark rose on your breast.
I will put it for a test
of this encounter as your guest.

There then, and let me plant
another here, and here beneath your pants
let loose another in the forest: we’ll let him tramp
around for a woodless valley. Let him find the camp
I will make tonight — but first must go out the lamp.

No lie back again — don’t stir.
It’s now too dark and — brrr!
it’s cold! But don’t act so uncomfortable. I’ll cover
you warmer than the warmest fur.
Me or blanket — which would you prefer?

Go ahead then, hesitate.
Let that silly mind of yours step in to legislate,
like some old spinster, the kind of love you make.
Go ahead, let it tell you wait
until it’s worked out some ideal, romantic way to mate.

Why do you huddle on the bed
squeezing double knees to the breasts
like that; why fold arms around your naked head,
throwing such a volley of tears, and nothing said?
I’m not impressed.

Look at me.
Lift up that naked face — don’t you see
you must be sensible. This isn’t fantasy.
And it’s no game; now will you please
take down those knees?

So cry at me. You say it’s sex
I’m after. You think I’m out to flex
my muscle in your female factory; your text
is that you’re the big production, me just the annex.
I’m the one that’s vexed.

I took you for a woman. I thought
you saw me as a man. In moon we walked
this night to your apartment, now at the bed you balk.
It tires me, this talk –
now, feel it! my erection’s hard as rock!

No, no, don’t try to slip around
me to the door. Sit down!
You stay there on the ground.
I won’t be made a clown
even if I have to hold you down.

Since you won’t get on the bed
we’ll do it here. I’m fed
up with your resistance! See, you make me whip your head
against the floor, and now the wood is red;
and now you’re still.

I’ll have my way before you’re dead.

It has come after all
even the moon is a widow.

Hurt-eyed catless moon must stand
wet-mouthed in the air, tonight
caught in the center of darkness breaking about her.
Like cattail losing the seed that it must lose to the wind
she weeps her whiteness above me.
Minnistress is dead and tears are dried in my eyes;
they will not move
just as Minnestress’ dead body will never more move.

Moon, I believed in you, believed in the night
you ruled with your face:
to find out now you did not rule. You only fell
eager-breathed on roaming Minnistress
who by sanct right of some living cat-mystery
wore the moon-dark crown.
Tonight you are pain-faced, little better than I:
with her dying you are part died.

Moon, old mistress and old guardian,
even you are alone.
You are widowed. Moonly
woman is gone from you, you have lost
all vital part to stone.

I stand in the street, in disgrace.
Bereft of all will in my body. I wait
for the last moment, when I have to know
of the unwilling darkness crashing upon the night, and of
the withdrawal of the moon, and of her black eyes
that prick my blood with despair to chase me inside.

And know what I must know too well:
that the woman in the moon is gone
is become hard-eyed widow
stone-bitter with her lies and illusions.

Unwilling, my being is thrown
like the churning tides of an ocean into confusion.

If I hold to the soft light
and you to the sad
what makes it such a wrong right
that we should be glad?

While wind meets the poor willow
and the branch gives way
why ought we be still — oh
and crouch away?

If you be unsure
and I full of an old wait
and fearful before love’s lure
why hesitate?

We cannot make a strange sun
sing a white moonsong
nor make two become one
nor live for long.

And if flies be for a day
and robins but a season
why ought we betray
such unreason?

Let the stars then be stars
in their eternity
while we be what we are
and save serenity.

Darkness, it is beautiful. The dark.
It is my lips sucking at what I know not.
It is my fingers gone into the dark places, like a ship of explorers.
It is me forgotten in my desire to explore.
Yet I am the vessel that does the exploring.
It is my toes when they meet the ground, power flexed against power.
It is my knees conscious, like springs, of their final connection to the ground.
The ground is not-me.
Sky is not-me.
But my potency declares itself against the sky, against the ground.
Where I am is not-sky.
It is not-ground.

It is a mystery.

I am darkness. I move like a ship among the unknown.
I myself am the unknown.

The unknown darkness.
I shall lap over you, another unknown darkness.
I shall splash over you in darkness and un-know you.
In the dark rain of dark life, we shall be.

There is an island in my breast, all snowy
with whiteness, frosted in tons of billowy
coldness of pain, and hurt of a cold wind blowing
at the core of me, at the quick.

Life, it is not a trick
played by some childish, freckled God;
we are not princes hidden in the forms of frogs,
nor princesses; nor will I succumb
to ignore what feeling flowers in my thumb.

I have not come through the battles of tonight
in order that I might be thwarted
in my running blood — nor by the poison of some white
sterile injury that has parted
me from the fingers of life –

though you with your mealy-mouthed touches have done
grave injury to me, and to the sun
that bleats in my blood with veins of maleness, rushing
like a river of gentleness, flushing
through my deepest-swelling reaches, plucking
the very quick of my life into bud in its fun.

And I tell you the wounds that ripple
in my blood like cold tadpoles utterly
alien, unknowable foreigners, spies, cold-eyed
agents, betrayers of me — out to hurt what’s fluttering

most alive in me; all that is hurtable –
they are the pus of evil, muttering
their lies of death. Ice to freeze the simpler
straight feeling in my blood, and make it whimper.

Now we linger
at the door of the temple of God
with liquid-brown anguish in our eyes
for we gaze
arms down at the drawn bright blaze
of hinge
fine-crafted and silver
that shuts us in.

or shuts us out

Oh the sparkling, all-virtuous hinge
clasping with all its strength puritanical
the oak-heavy door
that stands at the portal of the temple of God,
holding out the wrought iron bolt
of eternal demarcation and damnation

that shuts us in.

or out
Better to be a lonely old cow
that at least has its life
safely in place

and got the mute
whole green world of grass for its pleasure,
than be some pent-up young tiger
shut up in queue on the ark of God.

The pines pass us by
trees of hours gone by
as we take our car ride.
The clouds go rushing
down the sky blushing
hideous pink
as we travel by;
and the horizon thumbs up
to capture the sun, cup
over it in a blacking wink.
I think

we have blurred into nightside.

Three brown-eyed dogs and a woman
came up the grass
in the almost summer, and it was north campus.
And the woman walked gaily with the sun on her back
and the dogs watered every dogwood tree
with their yellow water.

Several people in front of north library
laid lazily back in the shade and giggled.

I came the short way down
unbraked through the tumbling gown
of green catalpa; and with the sound
of a hundred falling beans I came unbound

like thunder roaring.
And the sleepy snoring
of the quick ground’s whoring
hardness, brought me down.

Now I wait
castrate
in sovereign state:
too late.

The rain has taken us over
over the world.
Come on like a dark hood over the world,
and we are strangers
stranded
in the darkness stranded, and we cannot see.
There is nothing to see.

Down, on down, downward the rain pinging
and we cannot see.
It pings in the pine trees, on the needles unaware

drop on drop burning out.

Passing cars, their static in the street
slush unseen through the down rain,
fade into nothing music of sweet
silence, amid the pain
of the tumbling, drowning, dying of the world.

He said, “Life is boring.
Everywhere you look holes are being bored;
like bears in deep hibernation snoring
bore holes round themselves where food is stored.”

“Is that all,” she asked, “that bears do in the winter?
Is there no love-making brew of passion,
no sipping of holes within their hole? Is there no splinter
group of bears that act in some such fashion?”

“No, life is boring,” he said. “Life is boring.
You’ll get nothing from your bears but sleep
all winter, sleep, and weak-kneed whoring.”

“Life is boring then,” spoke she, “and the way you keep
your cold-hearted hands from me I sware,
you’re more boring than your sexless bears.”