Redding, California

For Father Seraphim Rose

No saint had ever prayed upon that land,
Nor even faerie frollicked underneath
Its red clay filled with iron which they loathe;
Nor had the sanctifying breath
Of poets clad the sere mundane
In glyphed eternities.
Or so I thought; and so I felt.
Hot-burning manzanita and the smoke
Of large incessant fires; the drought
Which made good serious atheists
Perform rain-dances; rock
Black, porous, strewn
Through all the ranches where it fell
Out of a sky made crimson by the fire
Which came from parturition of the mount
Not so far distant from our house.
None would have guessed Sophia was divine
Whose tutor was that harsh topography;
Nor had a Keats on such unsupple worlds
Been learned to what he was; our bird
Was not the nightingale but the vulture; huge
Grim eater of the dead, a shaman – wise
But horrible and nothing like a dream.

And it was death I knew ere life;
He brought himself to me in all of this;
The hot cracked skulls of cattle, dung
Left almost fossil by the unabating heat.
I killed a rattlesnake at three years old
And learned that I would die like he had done;
So early did I learn philosophy.

Only the stars seemed things untouched;
And queen of them, the moon; thank God
I had but little pagan learning for I would
Have worshiped these if I had known the means.
What my small supplicating soul
Desired from them silently I can but guess;
But even now I can hear water in the stars,
And taste the coolness of a moonbeam in my mouth.

The country was a man with leather skin
And shale at his joints; eyes of obsidian,
And diamondback the rest; the poison oak
Unctuous, did make his sparse habiliments.
Thus did I never see the beauty which invites
One like a courtesan into a sherbet world,
Nor does more chastely like a proud young wife
Compel you in to warm up from the snow;
No, this was Hector torn upon the ground
By godlike animal; a threatening cruel chief
With feathered tomahawk, and you soft-bellied doe.

The way they do things in the west
Is simple; and the faster gun
Decides the will of God. A bowie knife
Is in the fist of all the angels set to guard
A California boy, and they’ve got rope
For catching us if we break from the herd.

God is more terrible than death;
Faster, more cunning than the snake.
He bit my ankle and he poisoned me
When I had stepped upon him unawares;
He set his coyotes on my trail,
And gave the cougars of my scent.
I’d see the boughs abending as they stalked
Through verdurous black canopies
Athwart my brambled walk; I’d hear
Of evenings as I readied for my sleep
The ghostly yelps of the blonde dogs
He’d made to persecute the quiet black.

And then He showed me what He was;
Leviathan his plaything and the world
Like a rough stallion he’d broke.
He’d dress us all in snakeskin at the end,
Our bodies cool as moonbeams or the lakes
Of sweet blue fire that we call stars.
I had to get the Bethel-wound and limp;
Use granite for my pillow and receive
His clemency just when the jagged knife
Was subsequent kid Issac’s throat to rip.
His angels are great hunters and the bores
Of all their rifles sing the Milky Way.

Later I knew that I’d been born
In that same house of mercy where the man
Named for the Seraph and the Rose
Had been so plucked as after roses’ kind
To be the nearer fragrance to his lord.
So I was wrong; a saint had prayed;
And I had never been alone.