CLEANING HOUSE

It was a brutal exercise training my young will to taste the intimacy of the gods by degrees and not all at once, to go beyond the immediate sensation of the fever burning my skin

to those other fields

hidden to my common flesh and embrace in one single body the concentration of time and space beyond the distractions at the gates while watching the objects of my chase drift to the center of my soul like a herd of cattle gathering in a sandstorm, and feel the individual hurt as the wild cattle stomp the ground of the tender soul uplifting all human things like horses on a stampede leaving my soul empty and bruised but ready to move in and taste the intimacy of the signs of the gods.

(At which one of my gates do the gods knock, touch, taste, sound, smell, ritual sight, none of them?)

How does one know a god?

SEARCHING FOR SIGNS I

I keep listening with my eyes to the footprints of the dead burning hours of light on the shadows of the written page waiting for a god to prop up out of the oil of lives past as my soul grows fainter with the exercise and the fear of my own lost life.

Why not settle for the outside, the path of the written page, the life others made steal their forms and shapes and repeat the correct sentence?

But why settle for the outside lean on the shoulders of the dead let memory fail in the recreation of the original acts that made life in the dark the original imitation of the gods?

My soul is chained to the dead learning to sail upstream to the ports of infancy of the human race as distant from me as my will is from the original act of creation I am trying to repeat as my soul burns hours of light with the oil of lives past.

II

The pain became so intense I asked them all to leave, and so they did, the good and the bad angels after a whole night of fighting.

Very soon the house felt empty, the lights had no walls, no ceiling, no floor, the wind could turn no corners and the fog slithered across with no furniture to cling to,

it was the life of ghosts with the same cold feeling they give the stones in the cemetery, I knew then I could have company.

III

I knew of Your presence by the way time stood still, my body became as large as the sea all movement stopped outside as my soul became a surface of glass stretched to infinity with the feeling of a living rose dressed in a woman's skin, suddenly Your light broke the inside of the rose into a million splinters with touch, smell, music, pain penetrating the soul in a slow moving dance till the rose filled the air with living petals of flesh.

IV

We had another date on a summer night, the silence when body and soul come together to form a ring of one under a parasol of lights from the inside waiting for breezes from the sea to release memories from ink paintings in white prisons.

From the body flows the light to see among the shadows, and the scent to smell a passing god, and the sound to let the shadows dance and the taste to savor the slow dance in the soul

and the touch to feel the hand of the dead join the magic ring of flesh and flow in veins of love, poetry and song along the shade!

A God at the crossroads

of our soul.

From Moksha Smith: Agni's Warrior-Sage

by Antonio de Nicolas