Noli Me Tangere
1.
You see the angels have come to sit on the delay
for a while,
they have come to harrow the fixities, the sharp edges
of this open
sepulcher,
they have brought their swiftnesses like musics
down
to fit them on the listening.
Their robes, their white openmindedness gliding into the corners,
slipping this way then that
over the degrees, over the marble
flutings.
The small angelic scripts pressing up through the veils.
The made shape pressing
up through the windy cloth.
I've watched all afternoon how the large
red birds here
cross and recross neither for play nor hunger
the gaps that constitute our chainlink fence,
pressing themselves narrowly against the metal,
feeding their bodies and wings
tightly in.
Out of what ceases into what is ceasing.
Out of the light which holds steel and its alloys,
into the words for it like some robe or glory,
and all of this rising up into the the deep unbearable thinness,
the great babyblue exhalation of the one God
as if in satisfaction at some right ending
come,
then down onto the dustyness that still somehow holds
its form as downslope and new green meadow
through which at any moment
something swifter
might cut.
It is about to be
Spring.
The secret cannot be
kept.
It wants to cross over, it wants
to be a lie.
2.
Is that it then? Is that the law of freedom?
That she must see him yet must not touch?
Below them the soldiers sleep their pure deep sleep.
Is he light
who has turned forbidding and thrust his hand up
in fury,
is he flesh
so desperate to escape, to carry his purpose away?
She wants to put her hands in,
she wants to touch him.
He wants her to believe,
who has just trusted what her eyes have given her,
he wants her to look away.
I've listened where the words and the minutes would touch,
I've tried to hear in the slippage what
beauty is--
her soil, his sweet tune like footsteps
over the path of
least resistance. I can see
the body composed
of the distance between them.
I know it is ours: he must change, she must
remember.
But you see it is not clear to me why she
must be driven back,
why it is the whole darkness that belongs to her
and its days,
why it is these hillsides she must become,
supporting even now the whole weight of the weightless,
letting the plotlines wander all over her,
crumbling into every digressive beauty,
her longings all stitchwork towards his immaculate rent,
all alphabet on the wind as she rises from prayer....
3.
It is the horror, Destination
pulling the whole long song
down, like a bad toss
let go
in order to start again from right,
and it is wrong
to let its one audible note govern our going
isn't it, siren over this open meadow
singing always your one song of shape of
home. I have seen how the smoke here
inhabits a space
in the body of air it must therefore displace,
and the tree-shaped gap the tree inhabits,
and the tree-shaped gap the tree
invents. Siren,
reader,
it is here, only here,
in this gap
between us,
that the body of who we are
to have been
emerges: imagine:
she lets him go,
she lets him through the day faster than the day,
among the brisk wings
upsetting the flowerpots,
among the birds arranging and rearranging the shape of
the delay.
she lets him
slip free,
letting him posit the sweet appointment,
letting out that gold thread that crazy melody
of stations,
reds, birds, dayfall, screen-door,
desire,
until you have to go with him, don't you,
until you have to leave her be
if all you have to touch her with
is form.
Created by
guccipiggy
Last modified
2005-03-17 09:04 PM
Painting
SYLLABICATION: no·li-me-tan·ge·re
PRONUNCIATION: nl-m-tnj-r, nl-
NOUN: 1. A warning or prohibition against meddling, touching, or interfering. 2. A representation of Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalen after his resurrection.
ETYMOLOGY: Late Latin nl m tangere, do not touch me (Jesus' words to Mary Magdalene, John 20:17) : Latin nl, do not, imperative of nlle, to be unwilling + Latin m, me + Latin tangere, to touch.