Mysterium Tremendum

[RonPrice]

The realm of the imaginery is not a strange region situated beyond this world; it is the world itself...grasped and realized in its entirety...the literature of action is far more deceitful. -Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, P.A. Sitney, editor, Station Hill Press, 1981, p.36.


Why would I want to describe what I saw tonight
when you can see it on TV with a music background
and twice the intensity of visual acuity?
It was really quite an ordinary scene,
one I’d seen a thousand times in the night sky
and along the park where I walked leisurely.

Why would I bother writing it all down,
turning the visible into some kind of invisible,
inner smouldering around a breath of thought?
My essential precariousness, fragility, gentleness,
like a bee searching out the honey of an invisibility
and storing it in a golden hive where temporary
perishables are imprinted on my soul quietly,
with my personal stamp, where an essence is
resurrected in me, perhaps forever; where a
silent inwardness aspires, searches and recalls,
transmuting past into present. For a time,
truth palpitates and time is reborn from its ashes
in mysterious flashes of luminosity and a deep,
dense vastness motions in an intermittent simultaneity.

For this brief moment poetry condenses
out of the flying vapours of the world;
a private sphere forms, is ordered,
out of the public chaos of airy nothing:
shape, habitation and a name is given
to the frenzied and frenetic dashing of the eye.
And all that world comes in the door forever:
invisible, inaudible, mysterium tremendum.