The Two Christs

You will read the apocrypha
And understand a little
And begin perhaps to mason
The keystone of the mind’s arch.
Christ hangs upon the tree,
And at the open door,
Under the angel’s calm gaze,
Mary and Elizabeth embrace,
Each moon-bellied
And haloed for doom.
Two fishes in the water
Curve a cathedral’s bent.
Witness the cross of light
In the skull; intersection
Of celestial equator and ecliptic;
Highest threshold of the eye.
In the crosshairs of the sun
Glares the lion’s hide
Of Palestine, where two
Christ-children born together
Body forth the stars.
Souls in streams of bolides
Shoot earthward through
The gates of Cancer
Into sublunar trial.
Crab-clawed Venice
Grips the secrets
Of mariners and glassblowers,
Silvering the mirror
With progenitive death.
Which way points the compass
Of Porphyry’s eye?
Read the heart in letters of Greek fire;
How pale life is even now
Turning into a pharoah’s death mask.
Deny neither the priest
Nor the king,equal in majesty
And rite;the dexter hand holds
The lily, the sinister the sword.
The twin saviour reigns
With Byzantine smile.
Genealogies real and fictional
Stir like seasnakes in the blood;
The unborn and the dead
Share one missal.
Around the wrist
The midwife ties a scarlet thread,
The first sly weft
Of robe and shroud.
At the tip of the sceptre is a star.
The Virgin’s hand
Cradles a radiant wheatear,
Beacon to night ships,
Toiling home.
Leaf and tree, our sins
Feed on the deep dark,
Photosynthesizing
As they fasten on the sun.
Over the manger
Ox and ass stand sentry,
While Mary kneels praying
At her son’s feet,
And Joseph,at his head,
Holds a candle.
On a full moon night
The bull is slaughtered,
A dagger shoved into the neck;
St Luke sits before his easel,
Limning the Messiah in pigments
Scraped from the earth;
Clutching the hem of the goddess
Stands the man with ass’s ears.
Caspar, Balthasar and Melchior
Compass their road
By the seraph star’s needle,
Homing in on the lion throne
Of Solomon,where the Virgin
Sits with babe upon her lap,
In a Renaissance palace.
The Mass attains its climax:
The Egyptian seed-cake consumed
In the god’s honour,
Reviving as the black alluvium
Of the risen Nile.
The peacock unfolds his tail
And the eyes of the blind
Become fountains of light.
Witness the vesica piscis,
Birth passage between worlds,
Mandorla of the adept!
What do the fire-philosophers
Keep under their Phrygian caps?
A spark falls into the water;
A fire starts in the heart.
Up from the dark crypt
The worshippers of Isis
Cary up her wooden statue,
Brow sealed with a cross,
And circumambulate the temple
Sevenfold, hymning her newborn Aeon.
Barefoot in the Temple,
Young Jesus sets his feet
Upon two bright star-swimming fish,
Parting in opposite directions;
See his heels disappearing
Into the clouds!
Unite the two Adams,
The man of heaven
And the man below,
And give the man-woman
Dominion in the peacock garden.
Let us celebrate the age
With water,wine and blood!
The pristine sea still calls.
Warm mother’s milk the twins
Suck from Mary’s breasts.
At the Last Supper, Judas,
Conjuring some diversion,
Steals a fish from the table,
Sneaking it beneath the cloth.