Two poems by Leonore Wilson

Lucifer Before the Fall

    after Thomas Nash, Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Divell

He was a clear body once, pure bright

air, invisible, hidden,

so imagine not being mattery,

how boring it would be like carbon monoxide

crawling into the mouth

of one waiting for death, the gentle

transparent poison or fall out

of plutonium bastardizing the children

of Hiroshima, Nagasaki,…

Better the angel be veiled

with a grosser substance

that the human eye can see,

a form dark and thick,

emsulsifiable as milk or oil,

better to be insatiable

than ignorant, disturbing the divisions

of space, undisciplined Eve,

impetuous as pipe and harp,

better to barbeque like St. Joan

loving the faggots’ blaze,

the hangman’s match, the pyre’s

chaos; better to have the eye-lids

fully open when the child’s head

crowns and the pain of the cut

vulva burns, better to be awake

then dozing like Adam,

to be a part of Lucifer’s flesh,

his narcissism because to fall

from Heaven is the beginning

of beauty, is the start of the dark

fecundity on earth, for his

descent was not a waste

but comfort of tongue and reed,

this forgotten god, twin

brother of our own bones’ bloom.

++++++++++++++++++++

Translucent Body

  

“Not to find myself touching the other side of transparency, but my own transparency.” Clarice Lispector on the Berne Cathedral

A few shine in the great dark of the Pacific--

   sprawl over the pitted limestone, the nipped sand

in the silence so that they make the scars glow as they pour

   over the grooves and striations like holy chrism

on the sick, the infirmed--- creatures soft as infant-flesh,

    fontanels, transparent as Lucifer before he fell

from the heavens—disc of the god-body as it dissolves on the palate….

Ah, eye-lid of Christ, morning glories languish among the bluegrass

   as what touches the heart refracts the light

so tenderness shines deep-kneeled in song like the dividing pearl-cell

   of the amnion. I listen to Schumann’s arabesque

at dusk, to the boy-artist Kismet as he touches the white keys then the black,

   and he heals the ineffable mystery of each small sorrow I’ve

kept; he loves my child-dark thoughts encouraging me to walk wild

   into estuaries, to fix myself like the moon-jellyfish, the cat’s eye 

inured to the ocean’s brunt, inured to the blowouts of my mother’s anger

   and my mother’s fists, so that I am the crescendo of the waves

themselves—emptied, exiled—and flourish as the old hermits of Egypt did,

   those who dug their own graves, and wept in them daily so they’d never get lost….

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