June 10th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
(Featured Prose, Prose)
Had the gods bodies like men and women, desire would be the elixir, passion the holy sacrament, coitus the zenith of heaven. But the gods are forever bodiless, and so bodily delight — the greatest wonderment of all — became the entitlement of sunny earth.
Naked atheist looked at naked atheist and they smiled.
Sex and love — it was all the same to them. When ungod kissed the first human genitals into life at the dawn of the Pleistocene, the first human erection greeted the first vulva with delight. Sex became their Sunday service. It was the sun’s annunciation of life, and every day was Sunday.
To the naked atheist, living meant accepting death; but it meant also accepting the bodily self and, above all, accepting sex. Eternal God couldn’t do it.
God couldn’t do it because pleasure and desire and sensuality — the body of existence — put Godly existence to shame. Deity was nothing but a faint speck, disembodied, dim, a nullus compared to the bright sunshine of earthly delights.
To the extent that it worships the here and now of living, religion is atheist. But when religion looks to afterlife it casts life aside, and its eternal God strides forth as the lord of death.
Thus heaven and afterlife are euphemisms for death, and stand as the antithesis of the sunny cosmos of the living, of laughing bodies enjoying each other, of delightful sex, of happy conversations in the sun, of pleasant nakedness in the cool of the evening.
For every sun has its annunciation of life; every son too, and every daughter. They draw breath not from on high, but from here among the trees and mists of bodily life.
Naked atheist looks at naked atheist and they smile.
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June 10th, 2006 at 7:20 pm
(Darkness, Featured Poems, Poetry)
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.
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June 10th, 2006 at 9:53 am
(Featured Poems, Once, Poetry)
Jenny would love this gusty wind
were she with me here to see it playing
in these tall oak and birch she knows so well.
Yes, Jenny
would love this gutty wind which sneaks
beneath the leaves, rustling them
until they waken. The breeze
pretends it’s morning still
pretends it doesn’t know about the dark
the silence
which has swept across the world
since yesterday.
The wind is trying harder now.
Relentlessly it tries
to sweep the leaves and branches
into some sort of playful mood
some whim
to rouse them from the death-like mourning
of their silence.
Now and then
it pauses haltingly a moment. Then
rampages
rampaging
as if to chase away the darkness
as if to quell
the soundless whelming of her death
before it blackens out September.
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