part of a Superstitious People

But to have the thing and hear prophecy’s river,
did we want or didn’t we: Babylon visited us
late at night. The city said it bends its feet.
Here’s trees. Bare philosophy without a stop.

“Is it truth?” Snakes are come,
not scared by a demiurge, by a sacrifice.
This is how the people jumped off
no cliff at all, and we found things that fell.

We can see the brown riderless body
when nothing moves outside the cave
along the cliffs — we are from there,
are they from you? I am one of them.

Among them in a wagon is the holy container.
Through it, we enter the forbidden place
that is from another place but is not an end.

But there the like of all these fortunes
appears to us, as forward motion. This image
of us curses the goddess, down are the thoughts
they told you, my sockets. She is superstitious,
a feeling swells down to the created chamber.

She will always lie with us. Because, out of
this cave, what is it to us, as Men see the eye
in the end, in the mud — not what turns to the people.
I is the philosophy, was it our confession?

7/3/06