Rehoboth

‘Our need to be comfortable may be stronger than our will to survive’

Medard Boss - analysand of Freud,
Student of Jung, tutee of Heidegger,
Creator of Daseinanalysis,
Spoke of lumination, of how
Pigs belong to the Engineer
When the world is ‘bodied forth’.

But the unillumined world is a
‘Dim, vast vale of tears’ said Shelley
(And not only because he didn’t have a telly)
Speaking of a world without Beauty,
Weaving with breath and rainbows
Crying ‘where art thou gone?’

Even Newport’s Supertramp
Knew Life’s cheat, when
‘Beauty is not heeded or seems stale’,
Preferring a mercy killing
To a cold concrete sty
In the white acre behind his poet’s eye.

I would take you to the well of Rehoboth
To drink fossil-water at the aquifer,
To witness the Euphrates ebbing red
Under Isaac’s millennial frown -
Together we’d become incunable
Tying our gut-strings to Beauty’s datum point,
Listening…

Abramelin
Like a wind out of the desert on a flag of red sand

Nineveh’s wish
Morning dew gathered on palm fronds

And Yeats’s Beast
Tergiversating in rough bellows, still Bethlehem bound
A colder coming than a father’s alienation into
The Dad Gap, the prayer-question –

‘How but in custom and ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?’

But conjour this rogation
Under the long ‘Eighties
In the migraine of ‘stagflation’
A beehive of stars whistling red entropy up to today

Thatcher – sculpted venom from the liver of Medusa

Reagan – culled sincerity and spent it on make up

Bush – the brittle, darkling procurator of cant

Dancing to the swollen music of Chernobyl, Bhopal, HIV
Ushering up the plot twist of an end to History
Triumphal arches made of dust franchised to the ‘Free’.

Somewhere a white bull lowers its horns and lows at the crescent moon -
Could be Arizona, or Uttar Pradesh, Catal Huyuk, Patagonia,
On every steppe, on every plain,
In every forgotten meadow
Summoned by the genius-trumpet of Her thigh bone
To bring the cause to fruition, to atone
Dressed only in sequins of semen and blood
Free as the day before the Flood
Offering Herself in body, speech and mind
By a cemetery fence, effortless and kind
Undimmed, valorised, gloriously here
Smiles with her fangs, transforming all fear
Ma and Mithra, bowing
The Dakini wind, blowing
No victim, no loss of
Tightrope chaos
The flash of life
Crosses the mind
Of strife -
A tenable
Beauty
Is born.



KH – 13th June 06

IMAGE: The Fall of Nineveh by John Martin (c. 1840).