The Pilgrimage, Book II / Phillip Neal Tippin
Part 11
Knee-deep in fallen days,
I’ll wade my way home,
Each their hold has let, loosed
To windover bent forms
And nestle, nettled among
The points of Your crown.
(Christ the King of the Universe)
Blinking at the fire rush of light
Burning down brandished tinder aims
Un-broached
Came Meaning Maryfull.
But you can see how high I’ve climbed
But no higher
Yet this all may be a Hieroglyph
Yet of something higher.
I come to the conversation
Equipped only with enthusiasm
Part 12
Grow,
Burrow,
More and more
Mole shaped
Comment on the ascent
And the deep intake
Of air
Or codify the descent
In the exhaustion
Of language.
Sneaks in sighs
Let us be like John—
Leaping in the dark.
Felt a fragment split
Part 13
I have come from the very presence
To tell you of the Presence coming.
(Gabriel)
I feel acutely the bumpkin
Blipping through your past
Seems to handle the strain like sin
Parasitic from strength to strength.
A reflected shadow
And now I’m here,
And now I’m here,
Pressing the bounds
Borders of my time—
Time’s seventy times seven
Forgiven, It’s, my bounding line
Innocence and experience
Etched on a copper plate
Part 14
The Maker becoming,
Becomes Him
Mistook the words for maturity,
For the paper under the nomenclature
No niche knowledge
Just time bound minds
In list of rounds
Simply by the must
Make sound.
Fewer words
Hold more in common.
(A small vocabulary)
Part 15
You have purchased for me
A grave in the promised land.
(Gen 23)
Today we found we fall
Within a pelican’s sphere—
His coastal thrall
This mollified kettle-water
Is worse than the tap
The pilgrim strife,
Each mile a line
Or lie missed or
Plastered over
Or under my breaths
Coming shorter and shorter.
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