Preludes for a Prodigal Son
James Land Jones
To Jake on his coming of age 3 September 1976
For Jack, Christmas, 1976 (My hand written copy)
Song, as you explain it, is not passion, not striving for some end at last attained; Song is Being. --Rilke
I) For a long time we think we are in love with them, the Others.
Then comes that one who is so much beyond
That everything in us gathers to a word.
The dictionary of our being furthers
That one name, cognate of a fond
Tone that henceforth in our speech is always heard.
II) How does it come, this love, this being
In us that is other? By what unraveling
Do we lay before us threads that catch the heart?
How does it come, this sudden freeing
Of the possible, the traveling
over dangerous arcs, the daring starts?
III) It had to do with laughter and your hands.
They reach in wonder, play in space, astonished
When they find. Their touch so reprimands
All bluntness that things are thus admonished
To be kind. Before you came, my room was bare.
Then all that space was filled: your hands were there.
IV) Your image is everywhere. That body lies
As forest to all else; things move but
As you move, breathe as you breathe, over the field
Of all you are. The vision shifts. I
Find you everywhere foregrounded, cut
With such radiance that reason, blinded, yields.
V) That delicate green, so pale, electric, nude,
The summer trees diaphanous with light,
Cool water in a fountain splashed with wet:
These images are the world your body proves.
Naked, so fully there, you overwhelm like night.
My hands would praise that miracle of sight.
VI) You move with bright articulation down
The sandstone terraces of my heart, each shelf
Descending with such grace I know the gods themselves
Thus petrified my heart that it might ground
Your going. Go quickly now. These shelves are
Mined by love; soon they will give, will fail you.
VII) Oh yes, your body's tight articulations
Catch my breath; they quicken it, such levity
Has any body's beauty. There is no gravity
In this. Like sudden comets these attractions
Dazzle and expire. To deeper motions I am borne,
That well of you, for which your body's rhythms are mere form.
VIII) Your motions image that in which I'm grounded,
That other into which I long to go.
Before you were, things seemed but masks, unfounded.
Through you these things grow lucid and they flow.
Your beauty proves. Through it all orbits run.
I start my slow descent into the sun.
IX) Your body is a distant shore I yearn to reach,
An island plenitude, uncharted, free.
I'm carried toward you, ever out of touch,
A swimmer baffled, wearied by the sea.
I would surrender to that horizontal stair
Were you, too, not a swimmer lunging hungrily for air.
X) So much astonished by that first flooding vision
Of the meadowed sea, you feel your being's amplitude,
Henceforth your only home. You seek precision,
Mastered words, a chart to plenitude.
Take mine that move harmonious with that which you would be.
Together we will pasture the horses of the sea.
XI) Suddenly now the unnameable moves through you,
Confusing with its strangeness, magnitude.
You grasp at nouns to place it, give it due,
Caught between act and actor in a feud.
Water will take all shapes and yet still flow.
Names are a net through which becoming goes.
XII) I lie exhausted from this all night vigil in the sea.
I hear you clearly in the dark, but when I row
In that direction, your voice is only back of me,
Confused. Your words displace you, everywhere, I dive
And dive. You move toward me and we touch, I strive
To hold. Then some dark sea force takes you and will not let go.
XIII) Take from the trees of summer all their leaves
And wed them to you, those leaves that rise
Unbidden, full, and giving. Fear not some grief
From being too much you. Be wholly wise.
Give up your fear of dark, of the unknown.
The summer birds find greatest joy just before the dawn.
XIV) Why all this prodigality of bloom,
This splendid, multicolored, dazzling spume?
Eros arrives and drives all to this giving,
Granting each thing a superfluity of being.
Eros is profligate not merely for new seed:
All that we are is grounded in that need.
XV) Think of the gods. Their gaudy, vagrant passions,
So monumental, slow, live on approved
In legend insofar as we can fashion
Claims that they are distant, too removed
From what we are. All tragedy denies. We are the driven,
Beaten down dark stairs before the body's simple given.
XVI) She he pursued so ardently had already
Turned to laurel when that new different being
Of the boy took all his heart's breath, fired
His mind like Troy. Their touch was love, heady
With spring, with wild surrender, distant seeing,
Out, the Other, astonished music sired.
XVII) Each was the prism through which the other flowed.
That brilliant, empty, tedious light of godhead
Fanned to color: abiding green, the red
Of a peremptory rose. And his white light showed
To the boy that unity to which all colors run.
Like stones that turn to stars, each was the earth, the sun.
XVIII) Naked and self-delighting, your body nearly reaches
Being as your thighs surrender, spend and fount
Before a mirror. Narcissus at the pool. To mount
Into the Other, though, we first must breach
A union. Mirror into mirror must be flung.
Let me become the pool through which you plunge.
XIX) My dreaming fingers, gentle runners, drift
To dark earth, a trunk to climb. The plain that they
Descend is damp and rigid, waiting. They find and sift
Through sphagnum, intertwine. They take the trunk in play.
Your body tenses, shudders, falls asunder, smothered cries.
My thirsty hand is quenched within your spindrift thighs.
XX) I would taste all of you, not merely your
Shy tongue. With all my breath I would caress
The tree now flowering in your thighs. Oh let
It go to seed. That shaft, that axis on whose power
Becoming spins, I would take to my mouth and press
Until my timbers sunder, tunnels flooded by that jet.
XXI) Weigh heavily on me like mortality.
Be in me like my death. Come into me
And seed. So by this act we come to be
Becoming clarified: not merely one, but Other, free
Of the finite numberings in the salty blood.
I am now earth, beneath the Nile in flood.
XXII) In dreams I take you to me. I know the gaudy
Passions of the gods. Then I awake,
My body spent, and all the dark surrounding
Me is ever, always, you. No study
Can explain this residue: a lake
Of heart that will not empty and this dark, abounding.
XXIII) Thus carried by the dark I sail to dawn.
Daylight begins to turn you into shadows,
Grounding things. You're multiplied upon the lawn.
So much astonished, I breathe as if on ladders
Descending and ascending the miracle of days.
Love reaches to its deepest purpose: praise.
XXIV) Soon now the evening tide will quicken.
One final wave of dark will carry everything
Away. All I shall have is given. I thicken
And will die. But this so nearly being
It becomes it. What's left is praise. Shored
By your love, I'm beached upon this edge of always more.
James land Jones. 7 August 1976.
Dr. James Land Jones, At home, Moon River, Savannah
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