Not The Calm Before The Storm

Not the calm before the storm,
Not the calm after the storm,
Only the calm that welcomes the storm,
Itself, before weather was born,
The designer of turtle shells and wolf eyes,
The cabinetmaker for hermit crabs and honeybees,

Deeply now,
Time is passing, yet nothing stands so still as to not
follow it simultaneously,
It is the gold hidden by what’s golden,
It is the lightness hidden by the felt weight,
It is the virgin pre-desire, pre-womb, prenatally solo
and wishing upon a star while being one,

A raven perches on a white hippopotamus and sings
an apple orchard to ripen overnight, from blossom to
basket in an eye-blink,
By who or what’s permission do impossible things breathe
breath into kaleidoscopic roses who never say ‘I am this’ or
‘I am that’? Who never wilt and blazingly deliver snowstorms
to tropical islands with deep, firmly moist kisses?

You’re near me now,
Can you hear the avalanche calling the chubby moth to land
upon its camel’s back’s last-straw?
Can you hear the newborn cave tacking a Vacancy-sign on
its landing for all to enter its reversed womb?
Can you hear the cannons crying to Death for silence and
Love’s waltzes to crawl into the haystacks of new lovers of
a world reconciled by integrity and searchlights safely
retired since Lost has been immortally found?

There’s a golden skeleton dipping its hands in a warm
river of liquid rubies,
Singing softly butterflies hatching and tadpoles breathing
for the first time,
Father and Mother of, ‘This too will Pass,’ all in one, an
androgyny based on pure nakedness, no Eden known,
no Moses sworn, no religion rung or island christened as
lighthouse strong,

A single sonnet of living bone,
A face that faints Love,
A hand that purrs the most fickled troll,
A look, vacant of expectation, full of everything,
all possibility in the conscience of a coin-toss standing
on its edge, overlooking the Nile brimming to flood,

Before the pyramid landed in the imagination of its
conceiver,
Before the angel pressed its consciousness into the
softest cloud and visited Mary and her John as Newness
visits ancient taboos to whisper them to pieces,
Before a baby white-whale became one man’s obsession with
pure, primordial death-jewelry, worn only by the deepest
Goddesses of the sea,

Wrapped in lamplight,
Held to the sun, a crystalline wonder,
Nothing calling itself ‘everything,’
Everything echoing Nothing’s promise of return,

A single leaf floats across a sleeping water turtle’s
shallow nest,
A salamander hangs suspended in Emily Dickenson’s
wide open eye’s reflection starring in, in, into whatever
wishes to look out and be noticed, to give the permission
to be paused and taken note of by the heart, then written
down, like a love note between two ballerina snails loving
on shore a half-night before the Secret-keeper’s arrival,
high tide’s second silken floor,

The satiation of Venus’s musk,
The desolation of Vulcan’s rained-out forges,
The smile a mile wide, belonging to his own face,
since it was he who refused to stand up the umbrellas
to thwart her first visiting to his shores and in one breath
said, “Any woman so busy to tend to my fires with such
obvious success as water is someone I must love forever,
as the sun loves the ocean and oh, the weather we’ll create
between our thighs!”

And to the shore she stepped and the sands upturned
diamonds and the confessions of the dead written on
donated spider silk-parchment, read aloud by fairies who
are privy to such arcane treasures,
Starfish un-clung and swam to braid her long, flowing hair,
so that it would not become entangled in crossing Vulcan’s
forest-floor,

Deep into the wood she stepped,
Every tree a doorway to a bedroom, none of them
neither had known till now,
Every bedroom a disappearing act into an endless ocean
whispering ‘Venus,’
Till there,
In the midst of a blazing sun he stepped out,
Granite on onyx,
Onyx masculine on a forged cotton-diamond bed,
a Universe in width, a Galaxy in length, an Eternity in depth,
Mother-of-pearl Feminine, the creator-wonderer who paints
its insides with rainbow-conjuration,

A quiver, a smile, a simultaneous surrender of two to one,
Satisfaction twirling into a multitude of seahorses giving
Birth to the hands of the Void,
Void to the senses of the Manifest,

Those blank moments we you stare out and have nothing
to say, can recall no thing, are no one, a unit of measure in
a never ending calculation between the bed sheets of Vulcan
and Venus,
The birth of a new sun and moon are conceived.

November 3, 2014 Michael Angell