The Ghent Review Volume1, Number 1, summer 2016 | Page 47

From what stern mountain can I admonish this people? With what fire and
cloud may I go before them albeit for forty years?
O people I will admonish!
Out, out, out: declensions into negativity not to my liking yet from language
to intimate a conflagration. Yes, I will burn like a bush but I will not be
blackened.
This is the law. Unavoidable. Sweet as a nut or a berry. Another abundance
in another season – so what are the festivals I may attend or is it to be a
profane canticle which must cross my lips into the world at large.
Sweet nudity for which there is no precedence nor is one sought in the guise
of justification. This is the world. It is not other.
This is the world and I am a singer.
Echoes also of course – my feet on these stones and my words on the air –
so you there, listen. The first and second abundance hath come upon us yet
still at gilded animals do they bow in wilful submission.
Fallen Adam among them for the second negation. Yet I..yet I..not with the
Calvinist doctrine of sin of the fathers unto the sons for I have disowned and
ask again – father who is my father?
Silence.
Silence.
All is quiet on the air where apart from bells and birds there are neither
echoes nor twitterings a mind might take refuge in. then let the nudity of
god fall upon me as a seamless garment of my station and condition.
Condition: it is a mild spring day.
Condition: I am homeless and childless.
Condition: I owe no allegiance to any with, perhaps, the exception of these
sparrows in the air.