CLEANING HOUSE

It was a brutal exercise

training my young will

to taste the intimacy of the gods

by degrees and not all at once,

to go beyond the immediate sensation

of the fever burning my skin

to those other fields

hidden to my common flesh

and embrace in one single body

the concentration of time and space

beyond the distractions at the gates

while watching the objects of my chase

drift to the center of my soul

like a herd of cattle

gathering in a sandstorm,

and feel the individual hurt

as the wild cattle stomp

the ground of the tender soul

uplifting all human things

like horses on a stampede

leaving my soul empty and bruised

but ready to move in

and taste the intimacy

of the signs of the gods.

(At which one of my gates

do the gods knock,

touch, taste, sound, smell,

ritual sight, none of them?)

How does one know a god?

SEARCHING FOR SIGNS

I

I keep listening

with my eyes

to the footprints of the dead

burning hours of light

on the shadows of the written page

waiting for a god to prop up

out of the oil of lives past

as my soul grows fainter

with the exercise

and the fear

of my own lost life.

Why not settle for the outside,

the path of the written page,

the life others made

steal their forms and shapes

and repeat the correct sentence?

But why settle for the outside

lean on the shoulders of the dead

let memory fail in the recreation

of the original acts

that made life in the dark

the original imitation of the gods?

My soul is chained to the dead

learning to sail upstream

to the ports of infancy

of the human race

as distant from me

as my will is from the original

act of creation

I am trying to repeat

as my soul burns hours of light

with the oil of lives past.

II

The pain became so intense

I asked them all to leave,

and so they did,

the good and the bad angels

after a whole night of fighting.

Very soon the house

felt empty,

the lights had no walls,

no ceiling, no floor,

the wind could turn no corners

and the fog slithered across

with no furniture to cling to,

it was the life of ghosts

with the same cold feeling

they give the stones in the cemetery,

I knew then I could have company.

III

I knew of Your presence

by the way time stood still,

my body became as large as the sea

all movement stopped outside

as my soul became a surface of glass

stretched to infinity

with the feeling of a living rose

dressed in a woman's skin,

suddenly Your light broke

the inside of the rose

into a million splinters

with touch, smell, music, pain

penetrating the soul in

a slow moving dance

till the rose filled the air

with living petals of flesh.

IV

We had another date

on a summer night,

the silence when

body and soul come together

to form a ring of one

under a parasol of lights

from the inside

waiting for breezes

from the sea

to release memories

from ink paintings

in white prisons.

From the body flows

the light to see

among the shadows,

and the scent to smell

a passing god,

and the sound

to let the shadows dance

and the taste to savor

the slow dance in the soul

and the touch to feel

the hand of the dead

join the magic ring of flesh

and flow in veins

of love, poetry and song

along the shade!

A God at the crossroads

of our soul.

From Moksha Smith: Agni's Warrior-Sage

by Antonio de Nicolas