Poetry: Secret Angel Process

Secret Angel Process

James D. McCallister

 

As the magnetic poles wander

Onto the sand beyond the sun

This uninhabited soul

Lying in secret indifference

Witnesses a birth taking place

within her innermost being

The night of radiant depth

A song of the sixth angel

In the hour without a name

A total field of interacting events

A mimetic echo of the old magic

Of the heavenly essentiality

 

Thousand-eyed angelic flesh

In serpentine undulations

The arrival of cosmic grace

Of stardust and tragedy

A seepage of false dawn

In morning’s needled light

 

The process and the purpose

Comprise a fastidious vulgarity

Inciting a thoroughgoing backlash

And the shattering of the vessels

This disgraceful rigolade instills

But a fleeting taste of liberty

 

Supplanted by a better fiction

at once in and out of language

The eternal speaking word

Her humblest ascetic strivings

Her useless permission

The pointless debacle

 

Whispered prayers and praises

In silent clockless rooms

The harp has fallen still

Gradations of existence

The place of forgetting

Shadow of repose

 

Chain of emanation

Its progressive entanglement

Its fading absoluteness

Perceiving machines

Who run out of steam

That’s all we are