Chaos is a Melody (Here is how the Lovers Meet)

The Garden of Memory is a garden of music.

Music as vicious as it’s sweet. Did you learn nothing

On the water? You would linger on the mountains

Of delight, having learned nothing on the water.

Your feet stay planted to the ground,

So you mistake the rockfall for a mountain,

Not noticing all that’s passing. Pleasure is a landslide

To Averno. Will you be of the fall, in the path?

Do you not remember the beautiful singing from before?

When you walked in the clear night of old times

With no clouds to coat the stars or moon, no modesty

Of time, no formality with you, simply the revelations

Of the heart introducing its new moments to its old,

The wedding bells in you, your soul the busy toller,

Announcing the communion of all time to Now,

It’s all with you always. Yet you are at the roadside

Awaiting the circus of annulment to run by, to offer you

Employment, opportunity, to grant you some chaos

Where all living is a burning, hot wretchedness

That feels pleasurable because it is the first fountain

You’ve encountered of that water, a dazzling wellspring

Never seen but by those in this procession, these new angels,

Angels of fresh and tireless experience. They are angels

Yoked to dissonance, can’t you hear the minor key

That’s cutting up this melody? God plays a demon’s harp,

Counterpoints Love’s song. I sing you ways to love

And carry on. Listen! What is chaos that you want?

You learned nothing from the waves, amorphous mermaids

Dancing your ship to shore, shoring your vision to an image

You can hold, Aphrodite walking love out of the sea,

You a bubble from her feet bursting into being,

Caught in the arms of melody, singing to you now,

Your head across her knees, her hands running through

Your hair, her song is life to me, she’s singing us all free,

Beneath the tree too incandescent for us to see,

A star arboreal, brightness in a shape is all to say, entropy

The fruit that stocks the boughs, red serpents swimming

An aura that offers them an apple sheen.

Do you know what chaos is?

That singing.

The song of how the lovers meet

Blooms persimmons on the cherubims

That hum the fire of the sun

As yard lamps that perpetuate the spring.