Three Degrees of Blackness
I
Job in pain, denying that he suffers for his sin,
Needs humbling although he has endured much.
Yahweh in pain, yes, with eyes too pure
To look upon Job’s pain
Needs to humble his troubled one.
Asks Yahweh of Job:
Regarding the Earth,
Into what were its pedestals sunk?
Pedestals—we wonder—
The underlying protomāters?
Laws of nature?
Axioms a priori?
Self-evident Truths?
Not what are they—asks Yahweh—but
Into what were they sunk?
What grants the Lord Yahweh
But that we touch merely
The fringes of his ways
Sunk into the blackness
Remaining solely
Under his jurisdiction.
II
The British philosopher, disturbed, it seems,
At human folly,
Invents a means of mistrusting the miraculous,
Saving society from its specters and spooks,
Nullifying natural law from notification
As to what nature will never do.
The German who speaks with lightning bolts,
Agitated and contemplative,
Descends to nihilism, a blackness, a crisis,
To meet Zarathustra on his way up
From that beneath.
They walk together up toward a flickering light
While the face of the true God peers unseen.
III
Across the ocean a young haberdasher descends
To a basement location with a curious pull
From music he long ago blackened
For the horror it struck in his heart,
Music to the God neither just, loving, nor wise,
Now hearing a variation to send him home
Humming.
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