Gospel & Universe 🪐 Ars Moriendi

On Time 

Crystal Ball - On the Death of My Brother - Stella d’Artois - Spinning - Further Than Haut-Médoc - Karma Samsara & the Bug - 75 Years

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Crystal Ball

We’ll all end up broken in the scrap-heap of time, with the boards and steel latches that once upon a time opened stained-glass windows to the rolling seas, with the callipers and giant mirrors that first showed us our small reflection in the rolling stars; windows and mirrors shattered six feet under in a layer of sediment ten thousand years old.

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On the Death of My Brother

(aka ‘Plasterman,’ 1963 - 2020)

The dead do not require our tears, and yet we cry for ourselves, left in this world without them.

Of course we can go on, our passions like clocks that wind us from day to day. But when the day is over, we look to the west and see the rays are different now.

The sky is darker, layered in the endless night in which we too will be lost. Our hope of the morning sun has lost all metaphor, whatever else we dream might come. 

The sky is also paler, for with each beam lost we stand diminished. Where once we thought ourselves masters of our fuller selves, a hole appears. 

It seems too much like fiction to hope for a worm-hole, leading to heaven or new adventure. And so we fall back on memories, and flood the night with tears.

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Stella d’Artois

The dead carry us with them
as we float like golden bubbles up the Champs-Élysées
like the angels we can’t see
they find a new home in our feelings
in the beating of our hearts
& in our footsteps
as we walk up the avenue thinking their thoughts
& remembering how they carried themselves:

the way my brother held the ping-pong bat
& the way my dad straightened his face when he was thinking
quizzically
about the way his doubtful son was thinking the way his father thought
and his father’s brother before him
as some long-lost relative opens the door
to a bar with a mosaic on the wall
of St. Peter & the Golden Keys

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Spinning

You used to spin on a dime from one end of the court to the next, slicing a cross-court drop and making the other guy spin like Baryshnikov, but now the bus looms a foot from the curb and everything close seems so far away. The dance of bodies stops, and you can’t tell if this is your bus, a crack in the pavement, or a siren bell.

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Farther Than Haut-Médoc

I have been, and will return to being a bunch of red grapes when the wine presses of the South are empty of meaning. I have travelled from slope to cellar, from vineyards to the gullets of France.

In a past life of raindrops and caterpillars I slid down the rain-drenched vine into a jungle of green leaves and red roots. In others I was plucked by the fingers of Sicilian peasants, or pressed in the stained-wood carcasses of Provence. Steeped in the lore of languid hours, I laboured in gentian, high in the Swiss Alps, until the blue turned to amber.

I have sat with Omar Khayyam in a thousand cafes, but still can’t fathom the empty cup. 

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Karma-Samsara & the Bug

Beneath Shakespeare and the stars the ego shrinks

till at last you reach the size of Kafka’s bug

and scurry about your beetle business until you’re old and grey

and awed by the blades of grass some greybeard cosmos sowed over your little grave

where you lie like one of Poe’s unhappy victims waiting to be reborn

until finally you’re reincarnated in a caterpillar shape

inching your way toward the light

that glistens at the end of a dark wet bough

until finally you take a daring leap

and shake your wings in the misty air

in the mountain ranges of Shan Shui

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75 Years (.00003 % of Our Galactic Rotation)

1. Eternity

We are that ball that twirls upward in space from the 18th tee. As we move toward death, life becomes ever more precious, and yet we don’t have the time to take it all in before we lose it all — the purple sunrise dying on the edge of a swirling ball, on the last hole as we approach the final green. The clubhouse. Home. The Nineteenth hole.

All that’s left are several lines of poetry in a billion leagues of ink, and nightly dreams that make no sense in a universe of overwhelming math and logic, one thing causing the next, space and time omnipotent. But, as if to confound it all, there’s also emotion and understanding, love and wonder; moments of being before the endless night.

2. History

Scientists and poets point us irremediably to the watery deep. Half a billion years ago we opened our gills and dreamt of flight. Four and a half thousand years ago we first sank in the cuneiform of Sumer, slowly, blackward in the boat of Magilum. A stylus dug our grave in wet clay — Death’s first, but common, ride. Together, with Enkidu and Gilgamesh, we sank into the water from where we came, unfated to sail with Urshanabi (the original ferryman, two thousand years before Charon) or land on an other side.

Optimists dreamt of options ever since: nectar and ambrosia, milk and honey, water and wine, as if the afterlife were an outdoor restaurant in Trastevere, and the world were a pizza being whirled by some Italian in a floppy hat and tossed into the oven, to be drunk with a glass of Frascati Superiore, Secco Fontana.

And there we were drinking and munching on what we thought was the first slice, a crisp pepperoni sliding on the golden crust of Earth, flung on a Spiral Arm.

3. Hope

Outside the restaurant the streets are dark. Everything we ever loved lies behind us, on menus and lists of words. What lies ahead is anyone’s guess. If it’s anything, it’s a variant of hope. 

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Next: Like Flies to Wanton Boys

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