Poem: Silvery Radiant Song

SILVERY RADIANT SONG

Suppose we start with what’s right in
front of us

Piles of books and a blue thermos full of
water

How can we reach from this to a
medieval ship on the high seas full of

levitating saints whose vestments
flap like clouds

or salt flats from the wastes of
Africa where the sea once stood

on all fours like a lowing animal
but sank into the sand at last

leaving only its crystally salt skin behind?

Or how to reach from this place to

a simultaneous multiplicity of places
each with its particular

flag and its own coral lagoon
with soft music wafting through swaying

palm trees?

How do we get from where we
are to where we aren’t?

From our circumscribed mortal being to
full flight before God’s endlessly

Beneficent Face beyond all clouds and
hills all conflagrations and sweet

resolutions of both conflict and
harmony where only choirs inside

grassblades clods and eyelashes can be
heard ascending scales of

jubilant praise?

Our mortality can’t define us
but our divine contract can

whose heartbeats constantly sign on the
dotted line before His Majesty

at the beginning not only of our own
short lives but also at the beginning point of the

earliest millennia of shade and
light across earth’s billowing waters

where levitating saints whose vestments
flap like clouds float now on waves of

silvery radiant song

2/27/2008 (from The Fire Eater’s Lunchbreak, in progress)