The Pilgrimage / Phillip Neal Tippin
Part 26
The moon held forth
On his dream of day
To any eyes still awake.
The noc-turne’s golden whole
Note holds a measure rapt
At that rich gloaming tone,
Orb of an evening rising
Through octavian heights
And leading his natural minors
Up and over the clefts of night
Silence is not complicity.
It is the sound of the human scale
Encountering the no one.
That crooked crow,
The one with the limp,
Glowers over the fast
Food splattered asphalt.
By no means human
Yet through Human
Means you may live
At the human scale
With everything.
The practice of a poem,
Over time, grows slowly
Into its line.
Regardless of our strength
We just sit stock staring
Into the bright palantír,
Discriminating none
The terrors beyond
Each enthralls, entreats
Our weakness to rest
In those with the strength
To turn it all to their minds.
Part 27
Out of touch
May touch
Ground,
Less right,
More sound,
The worst of sin,
More innocent.
A split in the heart of the cotton
Wood’s westward face gave way
To wind, and left the defile
Of a wounded woodslide hollow.
Addressing with
Clarity, mystery.
Please stop me
If you can
Improve my secondhand.
To break the air with fire
Is all the punk could want.
Ordinary time is the purview of Christ,
The end of religion the prerogative
Of His extraordinary time— apart,
There is no time for the ordinary.
(Backed by the Extraordinary)
Go back to being here
Finding that two sided ear.
The soil says softly
What the clods speak aloud.
Writing with remnant words
Remnant say
When the fear seems gone
Pray for a stay
Part 28
I need more room for melancholy,
Without a chance of it hurting you,
Without the worry of a reason
So oft’ soft falling beyond me
In some song or in a brume’s dripping dew.
I eye it in the corner in trepidation,
Afraid that what I find I won’t like
Too late.
Naming the dates of my thoughts as they
Alight
And in what era they would have been found
Wanting.
In most ways
Obedience
Doesn’t speak.
There are more stories
Yet
Obedience at this step
We trade
Gloamy days
What you could really use,
Or misuse, is immortality,
As has been rightly guarded
But now brought to light.
Words sparing
To fight
Individual cliché
Part 29
By folk art attest
With the shepherd
That Christ is here.
I’m further west
Than that.
Suspended wisps of an autumn brume
Woven as webs over the field strewn.
I feel de-sanctified
By a knowledge compounding.
Words as the roads
To the Word, the Road.
A feasting famine,
A population plagued
Partly by their fasting.
Cut and dried
Could be
Luted, lithe.
Walk
And feel my youth
In the dark brooding,
Luxuriate in the cold melancholy
And return to sleep
Under blankets
Warm.
To admit without mitigation
Reveals a shoddy semblance indeed.
The day calls forth an injured man
Mustered more for the kill than his skill.
Part 30
“The Chorus is always
What I sang the First Time.”
My foot had almost stopped slipping
And then it slipped again.
Sense well
In this sense,
Draw attention.
Have a hand in laying the fire by
Split wood, gather from the stack’s
Further side, so as to leave some stock
Near the door for the next night’s fireside.
Time as the shrub to hide behind,
Grown a thicket, dense, to hedge my mind,
And now fickle fig’d, I’d fein not to hear
The call “Where (not when) are you?”
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