You dare to stare into such a friend.

When you stare into the abyss

the abyss stares back at you.

—Friedrich Nietzsche   (1844 – 1900)

 

Abyss, abyss, deep mawing abyss, is there nothing

amiss in heaven or earth or beyond the sun that you have not

 

swallowed whole in one greedy gulp, leaving

hollowed out all our myths, memories, hopes, dreams?  How has

 

a Rumpelstilt-skinned Fairytale Of Nothing emptied me of good thoughts,  my mind a

rattle snake pumpkin?  Dry seeds rustle.  I shake my head.

 

No sound, no voice, no breathing, no echo in eloquence can be

found. Shuffling all the pages of my holy texts, I hear the

distant murmurs of sages

 

long ago gone to Sheol or Purgatory or even Heaven.  A leavened bread of

songs forgo Nirvana sweetly sung.  Each song was un-sing-able except for air

 

on planet earth.  All our deafened ears so closed … want to open.

Rituals, chants, postures we composed … covenants promised yet broken? …

 

to right our wrongs, plumb our righteous surveyor lines of sight;

while all our human might bore down on shovels, picks, axes to break apart the earth,

 

to birth a new era. Call the bright day’s dawning democracy,

worth three hundred million votes. Call our new beginning theocracy,

 

praising deity. The nation is now full of spiritual newborns,

raising fresh baby-ish cries for breast milk

 

or for cuddling. We are huddling fast together in any case,

swaddled in unnamed shadows. Hoping for lost hopes, we do not abide by reason but chase

 

all our enemies furiously.  Our superior blessings shine like the sun at noon.

In thrall to self-regard for being divinity’s favored, we leave no room

 

to doubt while flourished trumpets call

that like headgear, badge, scepter, all

 

 

our blessings mark our superior spiritual station.

Confessing their dark and dirty sins, our nation gathers to lay hands

 

upon the heads of all the people

who in fiery dread we have called sinners.  We forget

 

the holy kingdoms which not yet

do arrive, on planet earth as it is in Heaven or Nirvana.  Forgiveness ever frets.

 

Good kingdoms must thrive by promise of their coming.  If one of us would save herself,

let her give a wise or foolish virgin’s wedding dress to her neighbor.  All the unwanted

 

peoples were never planning to compel us to be all alike, nor welcome them in any case:

our steeples, sanctuaries, symbols left untainted, safe.  Surely we chafe

 

at the same hard hurting burdens we lay on others?

Blame, blame, blame, nor bottomless shame, is not the same as good news.

 

Do we choose between children as Sophie chose in the novel?

(Who’s sharp enough to be wiser?  In that poor hovel of the human heart

 

is the true new birth we seek,

amazing us in mirth that springs up like wild weeds.)  Our redemptions

 

wait for us, like war dead strewing disputed fields left fallow.  Rest, one,

rest, all.

Hate’s Judgment, leaf and stalk, is best tilled back into its own original pitched soil

 

till some chemical process that the field extension guy

will fill several pages on his pad, explaining, flies

 

off his notepad into our heads, … or better, our hearts our bodies our selves.

Scoff at kindness all you want, it just goes

 

to show how you have neglected

to go far enough out, onto the visionary point above those high cliffs

 

where the horizon and the near range hills,

bared to blurriness beyond our eyes, cannot fill us

 

with awe because we are already full of appearing to be better than nothing.

An act of God sits there, erasing.  All our human certainties or ceremonies go transparent, gone to a wide horizon’s

 

nothing.  The Abyss.  You dare to stare into such a friend

only bluffing some false angelic courage that must quickly end.

 

Then we ourselves as sojourners or pilgrims

pretend no longer that nothingness so grim

 

does not know us far better than we wish,

crackpot, jackpot, barrel and lid.  Face love, be known.  All else is fabled Carchemish.

 

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