The Sunrise Liturgy. Mia Anderson

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СКАЧАТЬ willows, elms, ginkos, gooseberries, leeks, pipsissewa,

      unripe apples on the tree, ripe pistachios peeking out of their shells,

      rotten mussels not peeking out of theirs, absinthe, beer

      in a Québec pub on St-Patrick’s Day,

      these have their place in the scheme of green.

      But Not Green Glare On Snow

      on pristine white unlit or moonlit or shepherd-lit or hireling-lit

      black-light-lit snow!

      Snow is white.

      Chameleonesque blue or mauve, or grey, or gold maybe. Not green.

      Under it is green. Over green is white.

      Let’s get this right.

      People who live

      People who live in glass houses

      sunbathe.

      Once the seal on the day’s package slit,

      sun pops, light squirts, ultraviolet leaks, and the skin

      begins its melanomic countdown.

      Our days are numbered in suns and spots. It’s skin and sun

      all the way, till death us do part.

      This light we die of

      it offers us a dying into more light.

      Is that the Way and the Truth?

      I am the Way, the Truth and by the way the Death?

      We’re reluctant to condone suicide, hang on! we say,

      lâche pas! Yet we lie in the sun.

      I fall asleep in a cloud of unknowing, the sun bright on the bed

      through a dozen glass panes

      basking in the Presence…

      the Bridegroom in the midst of his swift course

      riding his chariot up the skies, loving his creation.

      This is the contemplative fix, voyons!

      to bask in the Son is the very model of contemplative prayer.

      And gradually

      the sun changes your skin, your borderland and doucement

      we are divinized ‘until our singeing day’ when

      what else? we fall asleep in the Sun.

      The raised eyebrow

      So the moment :

      you

      like any Cro-Magnon throwing his

      femur into the air in 2001: A Space Odyssey

      as the brass chords of ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’

      ta-da-dah!... upwards and

      up comes the citation, the golden eyebrow :

      ‘And I quote’.

      That raised eyebrow questions the horizon.

      There it is : the moment you wait for, hope for, cheer for.

      The eye is nothing compared to the eyebrow.

      You’ll see, it will get smaller and smaller

      that eye up there in the blue yonder

      eyebrows singed to nothing.

      But the citation begins, here

      at the horizon, eyebrow on its face.

      (Well, where else would you expect an eyebrow?

      Except perhaps you’d expect

      the citation mark to be standing

      like a sentence, a pronouncement.

      Well, but the sun, the horizon, the earth.

      You are prone too, to watch.)

      It says of the day, the earth, ‘And I quote’.

      And what follows is of course

      the citation, the day, the earth,

      the living of it.

      At the other side of earth

      in the course of things comes ‘End of quote’.

      A golden fauve-red eyebrow

      sinks from sight. But that’s beyond our reaches.

      We’re a sunrise people.

      Here we only start to speak.

      And that’s the story

      of when sight is cited.

      Transfiguration

      ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here.’ Peter

      not such an ass with that, you know.

      Many a true word spoken in mist… the Cloud

      coming on, the unknowing.

      The building of houses, that’s

      what’s on trial.

      The fleuve is blue as Welsh slate this morning,

      as labradorite,

      ram between two rods of ice, the maple sap suspended mid-run

      a Sanko Line freighter

      green as a glacier

      sliding down to sea.

      To build or not to build, before the transfiguring lightrise

      coram Deo in a house, new every morning and only ever once.

      We are a building species, we’re Doozers. We do.

      Sometimes the right building doesn’t happen.

      But СКАЧАТЬ