Modest Apocalypse

—a poem from Makarios, my collection-in-progress

What new words I speak

appear to arrive

obscurely as slow

dictation as from

an angel to a fool.

•

What words I offer

remain the barely

heard. They bear an all-

but-barely gathered

witness offering

dim terms of a fraught

dispensation. Yea.

•

I turned and I saw

just there before me

a familiar stretch

of rough road adorned

with much that appeared

sore unfamiliar,

resisting my too-

easily saying

what it was I saw.

I am obliged, then,

to speak around it.

•

The road before me

was lined with alder,

conifer, salal.

The road was graveled

by shale, granite, quartz.

The road ahead lay

hidden behind fine

mist that bore a sharp

resin scent, a more

soft scent of wood-smoke.

•

The far eastern ridge

wore a golden crown.

•

I turned and saw all

these things before me,

but what I saw there

before me was not

all that I beheld.

•

The heart of what lay

revealed was far more

the trembling áffect

of each image poised

before me. The heart

was my sense of each

lost forebear whose soul

yet trembled above

the road’s glittering

grit, increasingly

gilded by the rays

reaching from the far

eastern ridge. That heart

proved the soundless pulse

wedding all that I

could see with all I

also then beheld

invisibly. What,

then, might one suppose

regarding this span

uniting things seen

with things unseen? What

might one make of such

superabundance

save that all last things

will open unto

further openings,

save that all new things

partake endlessly

as they move within

the ever widening,

expanding expanse?