Thursday, February 25, 2021

Pateresque in Extremis

I remember, somehow, the vapours,
The smell of hay as strange music played,
A peculiar unveiling of notes,
As if a sculptor found a head in a block of stone, 
That frisson of suggestion 
Of an alien taste

That became an impenetrable fort
Created in the black world, by fancy
Oblivious to the snares that leave
The living mangled, forever bitter
In the waves of intellectual cruelty,
The currents of rough-hewn froth.

Enlargement -- derangement -- of the senses
Is not for us, those who know, but for those
We seal our lives against 
With the right approach, the proper turn,
To acknowledge the disappearance 
Of the agreed-upon world, unexamined

By consensus, inexperienced in truth,
No awareness that there was no consensus, 
Only compulsion, no truth, except 
As was assigned -- the openings were too bright 
To admit any concourse with such foraging 
For sustenance, in the dark of meaning.

What lifts away from 
The unassailable logic of another's ignorance
Are those who know to seek
The secret of wings, the insides of mountains,
The rooms in the clouds -- one could call it reaction,
A strike in an opposite direction

But it has always been the same,
The escape into what is just not seen --
How can they prove an existence
That requires in them no belief?
So there are labyrinthine tapestries,
Gems from Byzantium, fragrant scrolls

As holy objects set before the non-believers
By those who once were there, but are now
Interstitial, where gold lies unexplored.
Oh so many books to dig through,
So much reading, in order to know 
That what I know already is true.