Metaphor: God as Nature or Being-Itself

Anthem

Inverted needs, and one’s between another’s knees.
What’s steeped in sleep becomes submerged awake,
Beyond our understanding and below belief
To steal an ancient instinct kiss more real than scripture;
Rapture proved without a prophecy or doubt,
Speechless teaching of a Breath made flesh
From long before it learned to speak a single word.

Unheard below the broken surfaces,
All unselfknown,
Moans lose themselves in other moans.
No wave knows anything but water.
Two shocked faces in a one and only holy place
Can meld.

Sleek images of doe and cat,
Stern images of steed or stud,
Fall like falsehood fossils in sediments like mud.
All sentiments of human scent, subservient or dominant,
Reveal themselves irrelevant—obscene, brief human themes
That stay within the solitary self’s own dream:
Carnal without knowledge.

Our dreams are meant to meet, mate, marry, and evaporate.
Strong’s made gentle, gentle strengthened;
Playful leveled is how level plays.
Both stop and stay. This is the way
Of galaxies and light and stars, of teeming darknesses,
Liquefying earth, and shapely drops of steel.
This is how the universe unreels
And stays at play for eons. This is how ease feels.

And still by day we live afraid to live
And still at night we sleep afraid to die,
Dreaming of a solid ground.

Be still. Reality is here and all around,
Swiftest current of streams that merge and urge
The only One tumultuous tranquility
To shake world-stuff such as we like wind through trees,
Freeing every branch to play in autumn’s lordly, orderly disorder,
Raking clamorous leaves to clap and snap their brazen, long-drawn
Holy hush, then tremulously rush to hush again,
Another season’s tide to raise the possibility of bright infinity
Breaking wide and blue forever on this planet’s flashing eye:
Sustaining outcry living what it means to live,
Dying what it means to die to dread,
And fleeing solid dreams like liquid truth,
Forever Now.

Born into an Ocean’s roar, submerged in sound,
We barely resonate with All we must resound.

--Paul Martin