Sympathetic Suffering

The status quo of the breathing body is
Fear of death, there is a tremor in my voice.
There is no harmony, at all, anywhere, and
This never stops. The use of nature, which
Is what is given, swarming with the light,
With no knowledge of her creator,
with no seeking judgment in the act; the being not forsworn in love
Even though that be undefined and unknown
By the rampant seeker in desire, in
wildness, prejudice, and mystery;
The techniques by which we fix up for a
Moment of pleasure, are all
artificial, and they are doomed and will not last, but you shall
Harm another person and inflict upon the
World around you for a long term
the very thing you seem to suffer--
When you do not surrender to the author of
Death and chaos and nature itself, and
All epitome in creation, and all detail,

Who hung the stars out in the night.

We are here and we are half accomplished
In the friendship of souls. I can speak
The truth to you, you can’t deny we have
The starting point for the thesis in which
I bind myself to you. I think I’m
sympathetically suffering
Your extinction in a heaven of material
Bliss, and that I don’t consider suffering
Myself at all
I fear I may preside in a
Wasteland of my making, that I don’t actually
Love you near enough to save you from the pain
The magic kingdom of the soul (ah yes! the soul whose thirst can make all history seem in service to
its own mere toying around with the truth)
Has warded off already--yes, I fear
I cannot save you from the pain I have
Warded off myself with incantations and
A holy, cautious regard, a piety, for the
Inward preeminence of thought. Thought,
Yes, stripping the memory dry, and the inward
Presentation of the sight ahead of the
absurd body slain
Halfway across the starlit terrain,
which is the light of the years,

Falling back across the years into the
Nether embrace of the time before the weather,
Like a rough gauge, like . . . infinity.

Maybe you have taken refuge in the thought
That experience, here, is of the world--
But you can’t remember what it is you brought,
And that is a fatal mixture
which is bound to bring harm to other people. For you
Always forget the particular part that
will never be repeated;
It seems to fade away. And you take a
Fork and spoon and play, like they were
magnets--
Ah yes you know, magnetism that runs deep;
And with mystery you are padded; with
Experience you are learned, and most wise;
You partake of suffering just so much, you
Keep it unresolved
like the prideful gods
That decorate--in marble, in plaster, in
Glossy reduplication, in idolatry and all
Consuming, in flipping through the
endless magazines
While you’re eating--all the corners of
The society you have inhabited since the
Beginning of reliance on your own special
Brand of despair. How’s that?

All slow considerations, all silence, all forms of
Resignation, these are the slow upturning
Face of death. How’s that? These are the
Times of ecstasy, this is the dawning
of all artifice,
More certain of its rights, its rights,
Its natural rights, more certain of its
Rights than the martyrs of the Lord of the
Earth itself! Think upon it. Knowing how
To say I, I am not wasted in this life
In the material world, I am not grafted here
Like roots of trees, like the birds whose
Fossils lay on mountains where the ocean
Reigned, like a dog with red eyes howling
At the moon. I am not really here at all,
And other people, let them fall in the way
Of errant kings of old, like the story of
Life was endlessly replayed, like before not
Me but my father. And the world,
thus only imagined,
Is in the chains and bonds of sympathetic
Suffering, many interests not fully dedicated
To someone else who would be a person here.

The man made of dust is all mixed up, he is
Grotesque, he wishes for immortality,
Instead of life. For life is too much, it
Calls for judgment and a harsher spirit than
The man of dust was born with.
Ah, certain
It is, some grasp of death he brought into
The world, like a long-term secret in his
Heart. In guilt, you are stopped, with
Nowhere to go. How well I know this whole
Scenario! A world with no true sorrow but
Only the ones who are lost.
And I saw in a
Revelation, the shining plows across the earth.

Someone is confused because they cannot
Suffer, really! But are fumbling and grinning
And slashing and pummeling everything in
Their way, toward sickness like they would
Behold a former glory! Why feast the eyes,
And stuff the mind with stories and ideas,as if you were making some great study?
Why turn the page, when it’s always the same,
The chronic complaint, the trembling idea
Of sin. How’s that? The temptations of
A devil whose duress, it seems, some ancient
People almost made strict chronicle of. Ah
Yes it was not quaint the way the old folks
Moved with muttering lips and shaking hands
Across the kitchen with the tea tray.
The true daughter is going to say, she is going
To say, that guy is . . . artificial! And
She will turn away. And he, the false lover,
Has nowhere to go but into a plastic booth
And munch awhile, and maybe play with a
Fork and spoon, like they were magnets;
we’ve heard the story in times before.

Real miracles would follow in this place
Should I find the pain that the healer has
(And this in a revelation I saw) put behind
The suffering of the gods of the weather,
The slave laborers of nature, behind the
Host of angels, in the blood of the cross,

Marking time, making history, giving a past
To the world, giving us all that is lost
In the eternal shame of life never held now,
Here in the empty day of the modern epoch,
As close as the conception of God, as
Terrible . . . as the dark freedom within.

But don’t these eyes, and don’t these hands
Know of a resurrection of themselves;
aren’t I getting stronger by
The history of their involvements? Shall
Life be an interlude of the immemorial soul,
Who is such a bad sport of the sky, such
A transgressor, such an evolutionary hero!
Shall a mere indwelling, and the career of
A doubter, who is actually quite stupid and
Stumbling in haste out of the these days,
Bring a charge against
the frail trees, against the horizon,
And the people who I have known here?
Or shall I believe that suffering is the
Mirror of what is befalling those I love,
And shall I recoup (there is the pattern,
This in a revelation I heard whispered)
the sense of myself that
You have loved and that your faith in
Earnest sightedness, was wont to simply
Assume. Did I not give what I cherished
Most, and I did not swear that you shall
Not suffer and perish at my neglect, ah
Yes wasn’t that the nature of the promise
Entirely?
Well, it is true, there are
Nets and clouds of suffering and doubts,
There are rare infringements of your power,
That vanish, like we were unbeatable,
When I take the study of truth on myself.
And there, reserved, are the words to say
Nothing but pure joy is what
waits for us, for that heaven
Whose origin is in life upon the earth.