Yahweh the Irascible

writ with the anxiety of a philosophic mind
stirred by the books and scrolls

1—The Challenge
Yahweh the Ancient still taunts the gods
To show themselves fit by a good or a bad
Outside the routine to wake heads that nod—
A good or a bad unique of a god.
He calls them to say from times prior to soon
What they will effect as they say in their rune
That will catch a breath or open an eye
To show themselves worthy as they try and try.
“Has he himself . . . ,” squeaks a brooding of mine.
I hark to my squeak and complete the ellipsis
And query the Yahweh who spites his demise
With my words but a sputter to craft humble answer
That tells me to seek out the Scriptures and survey the skies
And heed the heart of piteous sighs.

2—The Story
Thou wedding guest—thou dweller ’mongst the goblins—I wrestle with my heaviness—
Have I a skinny hand? A glittering eye? Do I cry, “Come buy, come buy?”
O reader, what manner of man am I? Do I command the castle on the hill?
Do I distill my rotgut in the swale? Perhaps pinch words from poets in celestial jail?
Yet I, most I, marshal and capsule and rhyme my burning tale.

3—The Sylvan Journey Begins
I, poetchilde, not robot,
A man of years in my body,
Childlike in mind,
Wooden sword upon the belt,
Hat upon the head,
Daypack traveling light,
Sojourner in the woods,
The Forest Sly,
Bearing infinite curiosity and finite fear,
Listener, watcher, ponderer,
Yes I, a sitter upon a stump in the woods—
My feet having quietly transferred authority
To the fundament—miles covered—
Cudgel my brains.

Mr. Walt Whitman, pioneering in these woods,
Brother to all creatures great and small,
Metaphrast of the forest, caretaker of the cumbered ones,
Adept in the real or the fancied, abounding in hazard and health,
A-trudge along a lonely path he seeks to share,
Logical alongside rhetorical to my like,
A source of irritation to my simple self—
(Dad would have said ‘a source of perturbation’)—
Herald of death ‘lovely and soothing,’
Beards my bent.
His grief wailed as the head held high through the war is broken,
Yet comfort accepted in a song of celebration sung by a bird,
He posits an opinion
As to the countenance of the hooded face of Death.
Woodland comrades hold the poet’s hands—seemingly ethereal
As one embodies cerebration and the other sentiments.

Shoo, bird, shoo—
Sing to your mate, not to poets.

O poet, how I am humbled,
How perturbed,
And yet,
Yet, yet,
Yet how did I here
Arrive? . . .

4—Early meanderings
Austere the streets arranging, terrible of necessity;
Machines rolling, serving,
Gathering gaily to the house of worship
Extollers mysterious of knowledge,
Venial to the knees in mass confession,
Angelic in song to the heights,
Repeating, repeating words of ancient glory arisen
In times transposed, necessity driven, driven to decision,
Gathered in the sight of man, and of Jesus,
Man approving.

5—Academia
Mass and charge; quantum leap;
Concepts; fields; scopes to peep;
Numbers balanced; numbers sought;
Lessons learned; lessons taught;
Challenged; conquered;
Cap & gown;
Jobs & paychecks offered;
Would need a wife to give reason
To endure boss and legion
Of responsibilities.
More school—
repetition—
the familiar—
I’m the ding-dong man—banging around helpless—
The clapper lost in the sway of the bell—
Ringing the Fallacy of the Feeble Antecedent—
Like reckoning pi irrational because two plus two is four—
Not enough—If the Red Sea was skirted then no miracle ever—
Really?—If Jesus loves me then I will not die—
Got to do better—Mr. Harold Bloom’s “American Jesus”
Not fielding my questions—such as, up or down? with those
Who never heard the gospel—Nor calming my heart—in agony
For those weeping and gnashing teeth in a fiery furnace—
Who rives to serve the Country-Western genre, the Freaks,
The Incarcerated, the Politicians, the Blasphemers, . . .

Heave-ho, poetchilde, for pi never ends.

6—Darkening heart
Upon the stump where strives my cudgeled brain
My spirit seeks a soaring state
Amongst the happier thoughts of higher plane

For which the stoic stump releases my wait
And my feet quicken to the call
Too quickly for my blood to rise and momently sedate

I find neither soaring stance nor fall
But a gentle thought of happy childhood
Founded upon parental love serving to forestall

The troubling thoughts a-murk besieging adulthood.
(Thus memories flowed from happy times to hold
Where I encountered sobering song as I would—)

Steel sword butted into human ribs,
Begging to be held;
Conjugated robberies spoken of a million mouths,
Ten thousand guns,
An agon with the childhood trust
Betrayed at need declared
To failing war in Viet Nam
Would have crushed me had I been marched to it.

(Brother of a high school buddy—
Served up on the altar of war—
Fastened to the gears of savagery—
Mocked and discarded by the gods of war—
But home
With remembrances embedded
Like wickerworks in brains—
Was taken with his buddies
Upon the altar of redress
As their car enraptured a tree.)

Big bomb saved my father’s life.
Having been spared, my father would have likewise
Served the physicist’s part in capping a war, if sent—
Plutonium sword, nevertheless, too heavy for my bent.

Sleep untroubled, my progenitors,
Yearning heaven,
Scorning death,
Rugged in adventure, in poem, in trust.
I wish all, ours and theirs, a good night.

I worked; I wedded; I wambled the ward
Without knowledge of who I must be.
Having shotgunned quail and hooked fish,
Having read Don Quixote, I realize my wooden sword.

I seek the way true.
I rile at Whitman—who presses me in spite of myself.
(Nice word—rile.) I mean Mr. Whitman.
I remind myself that when Mr. Whitman is at his most arrogant,
He is at his most meek.
I look abroad—
Rage, rage against the dying . . . bequeathes the air with ripples in decay—
The Cordiality of Death frights with irony, quickens my step.
I rival with my roots.

7—Christendom
The Bible—the Book—much revered and much maligned,
Laying itself open, having learned colors,
Like a naughty thing at glance bedight in see-through,
Yet concealed beneath by the last-laugh,
Challenged by egoism and eroded and entwined
With exegesis—exploited by the lazy and the me-too—
Says what the reader wants it to say,
Bedizening us readers in see-through,
Too simple to be embarrassed.

Hard-pressed by demand, might it yield truth?
Propositional truth? Poetical truth? Storyland truth?
Jehoshaphat asking of Ahab, “Is there not here
A prophet of Yahweh? Let him speak!”
Micaiah denied the four hundred.
“But I hate him,” said Ahab. “The truth is only bad.”
Said Micaiah, “Spoke the throne, ‘Who will fool Ahab?’”

8—Is there a God?
Posit that we washed up
on this celestial shore
by a million years of waves
rocking the mud
which coagulates
to make us wonder
were we born of God
or of Mother Earth?

“Proof!” cries the scientist, turning the knob.
“Proof!” cries the mathematician, pencil in heat.
“What proof? I am ill!” sobs the knave, shunning ken.
“’Tis the song of the Jubjub! The proof is complete
If only I’ve stated it thrice,” says the Butcher.
“There is not room for Death,” says Miss Brontë,
Aside from Wuthering Heights,
Employing logic that would chill Mr. Spock.

Ontological
Cosmological
Teleological
Round and round the mulberry bush—

Greeks and Hebrews; Familiar thought;
Ways brightened by the shadows; Taught;
Religions crafting ever-afters; Nothing holds complete;
Exploratory; scientific; philosophic; mystic;
Sorting and shuffling;
Truth demands conveyance
And a voice.

9—Hunted heart
O sun a-sink and sky
In deepening delight,
I bid you fondest settlings as I fly
To my sweet thoughts of night—
Distracted by my reverie with naughtiness a-fright—

A weed-clad nymph!—laced with tendril, twig, and leaf—
She—in slanting light amidst the trees
And others daring glade
Present their naughty, wanton tease
In wispy, dreamed charade;

I dream a flower behooving here;
A grass-blade succors there;
The huntress shouts her heart-cry cheer
That rattles through the air:

The reddening sky marls my poetic blood
As I snatch the flying arrow of my dream.

I shake and snort and suffer retort
Succoring my subastral self
A-swing in its disport
To serve the little elf
Transducing my ideal athwart
To fondle airy pelf.

I rebuff my stain, my slinky soul,
With want to guide hand and fear to charm face.
As King of the Goombahs I pay the toll
Of slipping beneath my grace.

Anxiety buffets my lonely dread
Of freedom from out of my stall,
So I gobble granola in wisdom’s stead
And wiggle and spriggle and sprawl.

A Higgs’ boson! I cry.
Sasquatch! I cry—
The one smelling my scent to let itself be seen.

My thoughts grow chiasmal and congeal in paste,
Then out of the woods I crawl.

10—Bookish
Home again home, self squiring self as it must,
A chooser shaping karma—

What the source of a thought?
A dybbuk clung to one no wiser than itself?
A dyad perched on shoulders red and white?
A Little Man pulling wires in my head with a Littler Man in his?
An uncaused cause causing a thought? A transfer path of deliberation?
Myself? My other self that only poets know?
(For how can we think anyone freer than to have the power to do what he will?)
(To will what one will regresses ad infinitum.)
The fatalist laughing Point B regardless—
‘Your doom advancing relentlessly’—
The determinist crying Not B if resisted—
‘The inner stuff striving in song’—
Determinism saying Cause and Effect will rule—
Myself squirming vexed as I pule—
Free-will frenzied for a wireless pull—
Myself waving flags at the bull—

I adjourn the mêlée for electric light
Dissipating the dance which my nerves assert,
Employing the kitchen for a bip and a bite.

(mash and meat, roots and fruits)

My feet remind me they obliged and ask for comfort.
I kindle the iron stove in the dark of the den and shed my boots
With nerves hushing from a dither to gently alert

To the concern of the day which through me commutes
And the form forms amid the kindling flames of the stove
Silhouetting the image of Mr. Death who recruits

From bone hands on the sickle hoist to the ready
Harboring eyes a-search occulted wthin the black hood
Trailing the obfuscation of brume in his eddy

To serve a master as every slave should
With service firm and steady.
I have searched memories, readings, and all that I could

To find the Master above Mr. Death—
Yes, the one first pronouncing, “lest dying you shall die”—
Yahweh the Irascible, in fearsome, doubted breath,

Prone to outbursts of temper—notes Mr. Bloom—
Easily angered—
Master of all—
Killing from wrath people tallied;
Striking with leprosy the oversteppers;
Sending storm and drought and plague.
Orchestrating havoc to conceal a flub?
Temper-child caught in a fit of hubbub?
Seemingly cold and calculating via servants;
Seemingly wild and impetuous by his own hand;
Yahweh the Irascible, in command.

Doing-up her hair then daubing kohl, Jezebel painted her eyes.
(Do I lose the pathos in asking: To beguile or to die??)
“How went it with Zimri, the killer of his king?” she asked from the upper window
Beshrewing, “Wish you to die as did Zimri as killer of your queen?”
Beseeching, of course, “Leave me be!”
Upward looked he and spoke, “Who stands on my side? Let her drop!”
Downward dropped she. Spattered with blood stood the wall.
“As Yahweh spoke by way of his servant,” said he.

Moses had his questions, but gathered his family to do as he was told—
Now on the road at the night encampment Yahweh met ‘him’
And he sought to kill ‘him’—no reason given—
Our narrator agitated—multiplying pronouns difficult of referent—
We are left deciphering: By what irascibility would Yahweh now kill Moses?
At a stretch we might see Moses asking to die—his wife pleading
That he remain for the marriage of his son—unless Moses was out for a stroll—
Seems it was the son and not Moses who was slated to die—
Evidently the wife and not Moses called to ratify—
Zipporah the wife cutting her son—linking voice from her tongue—
“A bridegroom of blood—a bridegroom of blood!”—
Mollifying?—Or signifying the will of the Irascible One—

O soul seeking light!
Seeking love!
Has your God been steeped in dudgeon?
Can a Figure so fickle be fit?
Can a God so gamey be good?
Does the Enlightened One fight evil with evil?

My meal sours and haunts my sleep,
The persistent dream presenting that I cannot find my home.

11—Questions and exhortations

12—Criticality
Children to the sand, pat with paddle and pail,
Cautioned of the bottom of the sea,
Tempted by the glitter of the waves,
And poets to the sea, pat with fine-tuned feelers
In the guise of moonbeams sounding all the delves
Like the ever-probing waves of the wat’ry sea,
And I to the woods return in daylight, wooden sword upon my belt
In case of a cougar or bear—
Mutter!—my mouth. Reverberate!—my mutterings.
Awaken!—my brain, and find the truths that you seek—
Not seeking peace in evasion but in answer.

A-perch in trees birds sing of love;
Snakes a-slither scan;
Creepers creep and toadstools totter:
Where go’st thou, jolly ding-dong man?

The birds bestir poets to falsified hope.
I turn thus to the snakes—seeking truth—
O goombah desperado—
Weeds and grasses and dandelions—
Here, snake, here you are!
Do snake eyes hypnotize?
I posit an evolutionary past
And find snake tongue.

Divulge thy secrets! say I.

Make acquaintance with mine auntie in the dale
Grubstaking jurisdiction of thy mind, gain I.

I know the spot,
A likely spot,
Where a poet might make acquaintance
With the reptilian underworld
Offering alternative
To the failed discovery-dome
Of artificial light.

13—Burning incense
I find the dale-spot and seek the serpentess.
—O poetchilde goobermeister!
—Are the o’er-shined stars your guide?
—What tell the twinkles in the trees?
—What whisper of your heart cut free?
I find the snake. She speaks.

Thou seeker of knowledge beyond,
No answer ariseth from here.
I wilt harken with snake-ears to the beyond,
And if thy soul be acquiescent and nothing loth
It shall dance among the stars.
Bestow on me half a time.

I bow then step,
My thoughts a-scurry—
Worry betrays my brain—
I make a round and find a snakeskin empty—

(Georgia to ’Fr’isco
Nothin’ found
Dock-o’-the-bay turns one around
While Home a-yawn opines.)

Able only to plop—Befriended by the dirt—
Sequestered by my home-spun need
Deepening in thought and fear
Easily confused and Efferent from Genius—
I assuage my anger and seek from poets the way—

Sore sandbagged Mr. Frost says cord of wood
Stacked just so alone—
All, all, alone in a wide, wide wood with stay
And rail begun to slip from age unknown—
No path to a farmhouse for wagon or sleigh.
I doubt my purpose wincing at the thought
That drove me here with hope alive with chirp
Of feathered thing—alas, I chased away,
Thus hope cannot the darkening gloom usurp.

My finger draws a smiley-face in the dirt.

I see the grin scarce suppressed
Of Mr. Browning’s cripple
Sending Childe Roland to the Dark Tower,
Tagging him a-drift to glory and his Doom.

My finger wiggles through the smiley-face.

I feel Miss Dickinson fleering
With her House of Doom.

The palm of my hand erases all.

I hear Miss Brontë, with déjà vu
All over again, defying Mr. Death—
Her cheer strangely proffered in Wuthering Heights.

I cozy to the friendship of the dirt.

But wait! Mr. Flew announces belief, amending Mr. Hume,
—Or does Mr. Kant suggest ‘apprehending Mr. Hume’?—
Analyzing splendidly—exhaustively—
Wafting smelling salts to Aristotle’s God philosophically
—As Dagon is hoisted back up in the presence of the ark—
Seeing wonder through microscope and telescope—
Intuiting a God who at least achieves Socratic virtue—
Grappling for a God of justice by the standards of philosophy—
Determinism charging God with ruin alongside weal—
Free will striving to relieve the charge—
A bugaboo for me and he—

(Could Eve have chosen otherwise? Or Adam?)

Pressed with the unyielding dilemma
That all choices root in the inevitable
Yet the evitable ought be possible for God to be just
And pressed with a sense of failure
As each lemma is asked to befriend the other
And pressing back to solve the dilemma
Before choosing to trust the answer
To the God he struggles to find—
He thus posits a mind with power to unfold a mind
With power to have chosen what happened not—
How might a Mind be stronger than Itself?
Could such a Mind o’erreach both Causality and Chance?
Does failure in this matter endow our Yahweh with guilt?
Dare we box with God?
Might our Yahweh be dubbed Jerub-Yahweh?
Do we surrender life to perplexity?
What if we build on the plank that life is undeserved?
How might Humans draw a Line that Marvel must obey?
How might Science draw a Line along which Matters lay?
Mathematically we seek the apodeictic.
Poetically we caper with library card palmed in the hand.
Posit a hobgoblin holding huggermugger—
Harry Harry the Hobgoblin, poetchilde (making puns),
Till he pulls off his mask—
Fancy the face!—that braces the mask
To express what the face can ne’er show.
Then study the mask and study the face
For the heart of hearts resides far far below.

I remember Mr. Tyndale giving his life for his cause.

14—Glimmering!
Amanda gone.
Ann offering gray-haired counsel in the gambit of a pawn.
My brother tickled colors. Myself a free bufoon!
One would think that God would help a family.
The knittings of a long-lost languished laughter o’ertake my prayer.
Feelings tidy after thoughts—ruffled again
By the putative presence of the Almighty,
My philosophic mind abuzz with scruples but my heart in a calm.

Alone?
Like a tortoise plodding the path known to a slow-stepped life—
Like a soul that must choose what tune to sound on its silly fife—

Grunting in my glory—gruntwork of my youth—
A hitch from heights unknown hales me to my feet,
A rush of air whispering as the dirt lets me go.
The air chills me to goosebumps
O’erwarmed by the sunlight incandesced by kaleidoscopes of greenery up-thrust
From which the dropping pine twigs entertain playful squirrels
Whence my mind relaxes as it marvels at the blend of quiescence,
Seating me on a cozy log,
Grafting my Grecian deliberation to Hebraic stories,
Cambering memories which begin to align to the hub of meditation—

The memory of a scroll—angel and prophet—
the words Gabriel spoke to Daniel—
leaping lively to the least of all possible ponderers!

The passage springs to life!

Speaking from times past what had not yet been cast!

Betokening-talk patch-corded—
Silver-steppers in reward—
Free for the working of the wind—

Success in circuit struck!

And I unriddle the rune translated at risk driven by love—
A runic “what”—daring a runic “when”—
Consummated!—

Historically indubitable—philosophically sound—poetically free—

So to the One who speaks from time,
Semble I an altar—
Found stones hewn not by human hands,
Found fire which prayer must fan,
Found faults which mustwise smoke upon the stones,
Established as a temple venerating Yahweh,
The ancient one—the Ancient.

Great sky-lit flame a-catch within my bones,
Wrenching me from my log,
Inciting love to tell my story—
Nor yet in snake tongue nor in birdsong—
Speak I as how I can—in humble-effort apologue
—If a rogue and peasant slave hath pen to write—
Depicting what I see.

I deploy my notebook, and find an obliging stump.

15—ξ
O feather chosen by a rhyme,
Given power from above
And voice by poetchilde
To speak in apologue,
As stars could shine to note their niche
Gathered from upper dust by forces nether
So gods might note their presence by a feather
Dropped from wing of headlong angel’s daring pitch.
Feather spiraling amid the air
Fluttering with subtle glance,

O summons of the Book,
From Isaiah’s 41st,
You speak as if the gods can hear,

“How about a world religion?”
Says the feather I have seen,
“Promised by my owner
Sixty-nine sevens of years
From Nehemiah’s going forth—
Promised to do what Jesus did—”

16—Venturing
‘Yahweh All-too-Human,’ says Mr. Bloom,
As Yahweh cries, ‘Let me annihilate this people!’
And Moses says, ‘No, my Lord, what will the nations think?’
Thinkers ask,
‘Yahweh the Fictive Literary Device, or Yahweh the Author?’
I answer with Greco-Mind:
‘Either could turn a feeling or embower a prayer.
Either could play protagonist or subject.
Neither could die.’
Mr. Bloom suggests it does not matter
—‘Unless,’ say I—
‘unless One cares—evidenced by a feather’—
A feather One only has dropped—frightening me—albeit
shy and hidden
with ecstasies of stealth
stilled for the passing of dreaming feet
splashed stiff with sea-scurf and salt weather
to join the ink-and-quill world.

Is a sword of wood sufficient, O poet of fear?
No swinish soul can hope to see a gift
Outshine the rubble set in shape of hope—
No dullard hiding talents in the earth—
poetchilde to the Forest came!
He must not trample pearl to his shame—

(I promised words depicting what I see.)
The least of all possible ponderers speaks!

From Nazareth of Galilee, one Jesus, scholars agree,
Went preaching and teaching the Kingdom of God,
A teaching now spotted in time—fourth decade C.E..
Followers sprang up like June bugs, becoming Jesus Movements
Pondering such as how Abraham’s seed could bless all nations,
The Movements coalescing first to Congregations, then to the Holy Church
Which foundered into power and wealth upon a grandiose perch.

(Went preaching? Sent preaching? Happened to preach?)

(The feather answers:)
Gabriel’s words stood mysterious:yet time is heralded and reached,
The decree of seventy weeks having placed archways over the road
Unseen in the mist of guardedness for centuries after they were breached,
Marking matters worked by the wary waiving wander; waymarks that bode
Redemption though few knew they were wrecked; tall archways beckoning,
Celebrating world-changing movement; stone archways betokening
The arrow on the signpost on the roadway published by Jeremiah
Sending choosers of Yahweh straight, weeping and begging favor,
Paying attention to the highway, New Covenant in their carts,
Meeting Jesus tapping rhythm on his tabor,
Writing Torah boldly on their hearts.

17—Sent
Feather feather, bright sunny weather—
But if not from this world, from where?
Not from an ostrich. Not from a crow. Not from a trotter or flyer.
A feather so light it floats in the vacuum; so heavy it sinks in the sand.
It is worn upside down and moves backward in time
Saying hello to brave Maccabees, Persians, and Medes,
Landing with care where it sprang debonair, purchased with ink and reeds.

Universities now are full of folk with a love of clues to our roots
Who read steles and scrolls traced from long, long ago
And piece them together like paperclip chains making dates,
Not of amorous kind, but of solar returns counted aft and fore
To send a sophomore a terrible snore until the grand moment
The feather is seen with impossible chance undenied—
The one they call Jesus, the sleek Nazarene, showed up exactly on time.

18—Pause
Selah.

19—Reflect
Knocked down with a feather! Unreal!
A rune bespoken. A promise fulfilled. A work of centuries.
Grand in the sprout. Dismal in the growth.
How follows from love in fine works the building of empires?
The killing in Crusades?
The estrangement over hermeneutics or the skirmishes over purse strings?
Had Jesus not taught the Golden Rule? How happed holy horror horned in?
How happed the poet to name the growth “Our Lady of Pain”?
Sweet lies, bloody kisses, and more! Again my soul squirms in its haunts.

Choose I by willful spirit the burning of the feather?
Take I leave of the world scratched and tangled in the heather?
I sink with gasp into the ease
Of habits, pleasures, and memories of the tease
Of nymphs and elves, met by pitched-down shrieking delves,
Which return me to the prudent world, lookers-back a-falter,
The squandering of proclivities gradually kissed off.

Cut through, O feather-catcher, the pride and thievery,
The twisting and aggrievery,
Double-talking as our humors shimmy in our skin.

(Daniel snubbed by scholars with gestures three—

So grand in the sprout
Yet dismal in the growth,
Might the harvest yet fill empty hives?

I surmise:
The trustee given rope to bridge chasms and to sail
With the message giving hope surely never meant to fail
Erelong began the wrangling of glory from the God
Of message—God of angel-wing a-dive.
Is glory what I want? Wrangled glory a-thrive?

20—Live the life
Notebook filled—rumination watchful—I stroll through the woods—
A rune writ by hand of Daniel or unnamed,
Whether in time of Exile or of Maccabees it matters little,
Whether five centuries or two went past—then out the message struck.
Why yet it shows itself to me, so tremulous and sere?
To lift my head with courage or to fright my soul with fear—
Do I know what I have met?—Have I courage to say ‘Yes’?—
I am a lonely sort—susceptible to solitude—quickening in quietude—
Matters dawn slowly as they sift through my heaviness—
Yahweh speaks?!—I must slink into his earthly court.

“To whom do you belong?” asks a Voice—and I faint.
A gentle hand revives me and a voice: “To whom?”
(My circumferential ponderings have set my mind in bloom
To a knowledge that allots me hope and plaint.)
“To you?—You show yourself authentic, but is there taint?
I see no other, and your Book waits opportune
Yet my thoughts begin to dance themselves into a spume.”
“Active is my force,” says the Voice, in a way I take as quaint.

I am shown my nook, and returned to the forest.

The earth has cracked beside my feet—
Does fire next fall? Yet
I live—for now—fragile

Entrusted with a feather—
Afloat with a feather—
Fragile—insufficient—imperative—
Fallen from what sky?

Proof of a force to speak and make it so.

The feather caught as the Book is plumbed—
Perplexing in its plumb.

Feather under glass will not besmudge
But will it serve?
Will it dust the eternal questions?
Like a dig—a ten-foot trench
Dug with a feather—
Will it yield time indefinite
If snatched out of the heather?

The Book reads clear
And the Book reads strange.
“Strange” means I know not yet the reason.
I wait for thoughts that lie in season.

_______

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