the New Pantagruel

The Illuminati

In her glancing up and startled admission
     the reader who could forgot her own century.
In his switching to the left hand
     the monk compelled to continue with the Word.
In his pianist’s passionate dexterity
     the typesetter on his ten-thousandth line.
In the crowd at a Grecian wandering poet
the living, scarcely breathing promptbook.
In the scouring through hundreds of pages
the author who cuts a single word.
In her reaching first for her diary
     the woman awoken by cries of a fire.
In its pinch and light-headed diffusion
     the cognate from an ancient language.
In his illiterate understanding
the Shepard who found scrolls in broken jars.
In the passing and the passing on.

Anthropology

She had expected surrender this evening.
She had expected an extinguishing:
     each one the cell of a heart submissive
     and pounding to make God live.
She found faces, distinguishable faces.

She had expected to touch the primitive
     as lovely as blood on a marble cheek.
She had expected the golden calf’s eternal lure
and the moonlight frenzy of Bacchus
     that makes the orgiastic not unthinkable.
She found faces, distinguishable faces.

She had expected to find in them the expectation
     —for those who failed again to come;
     for a priest who stumbled on the sacred words;
     for the icons abused with dust—
She had expected to find a hope of rifts and sulfurous rain.
She found not expectation of a boil.
She found faces, distinguishable faces.

She had expected a closing incantation.
She had expected a climax of the body
in a closing incantation.
She found them slipping out before the last notes.

She found her own disbelief as she pushed through the crowd.
She found that the sun had set as if the world were changed.
She found a thing impossible in vistas from above:
We have boring, distinguishable faces.