Aria


    All phases have beauty. Or in shaping time
    was Bach lost to all but the count, not consonance?

    One in the other, carriage and contained,
    body and spirit, hitched, indivisible:

    From the ground up with fractal scaffolding
    he built his arc, this liquid bridge for the daily

    practice of sameness, sequence, awaking
    change, the brief, the sustained — and the enduring

    whole bears as one all notes, as one word might
    all said or sung. Where does it come from, the material

    of the beautiful? And how aligned or skewed
    toward discord, how reasoned with ardor and risk,

    how little or much design or dumbfound —
    how can we know? Grave, heavenly,

    like the illumined face of a god rubbed from stone,
    these breaths so wholly numbered and numinous ?

    A mere miracle of physics? Mathematics' holy writ?
    Most musical web of ordered intervals framed

    by symmetry, division, multiples — most melancholy
    joy: Ten parallel horizons zenithed

    toward always, thirty-two limiting longitudes:
    A language, a form, a key. God, Johann: When in thrall

    a pianist's hands arch intimate
    to make the passage — to touch

    your immortal body — it is as if the finite, bound,
    has unwound when your now becomes now anew,

    now mine. As if thresholds allowed recrossing: Forever
    to be content, a soul at home, with a life like art

    more puzzle than plan, more flight than counterweight,
    the perfect grid of abiding piers upon which you

    superimpose the moving force
    of brilliant ephemera ...


    Variation 1: Yhwh


    Explode from the cauldron dark,
    that's what I'd do for them: That in mind into self

    and other I divided. In and in I overlapped in density
    and where I was gravid I breathed their breaths.

    With my body like a brine spiraling I stirred
    the silence till it echoed apart from me, and where I

    was deafened I hummed their frequencies.
    From a floating ground I fired rounds of clouds

    flaming and where they burned I brewed the rutilated
    light till it refracted in the wells between comets rocketing.

    In and in through the ancient rooms I fell and where
    there were thresholds I left them canyons gorgeous

    and aggrieved. Flung wide, electrified, I striated skies
    with ellipsis, color, collapse, shot suns past

    eclipse, blew the air for sound to sound
    from touch, touched them till they cried in ecstacy:

    Out and out and through the skin my sweat
    ran and poured into hollows so where I emptied

    they filled and though I encompassed
    they merely contained. Into the molten cavity I

    dropped a stone, I lit the furnace, stretched a hide.
    I wielded the ragged white-veined ice and birthed

    spinning galaxies in atoms, vital alluvium, the eternal
    quest for me. I remembered and made them

    forget. I raged and sweetened them. Formless then
    I dimensioned space, delineated them. I swallowed

    my own throat to feed them hungers delicious.
    Where I could not pass I corridored their heavens.

    Where I felt nothing I caused them passion and urge.
    I watch them and they are blind to me.

    I lie awake, and they dream.
    I cry out to them, and they die.


    Variation 2: Interval


        If in the temporal world
        of the measure

        of plenitude that spans
        the vast interstice

        hanging in the balance
        between the invocation

        and the prayer — O
        holiest interval — there

        were no mercy and God
        the invention said yes

        I'm here you rang
        why tarry Say

        yes yes I am ready
        Death is for being

        done
        with finitude:

    If in the temporal plenitude
    the measured world hung

...