Out of Nothing, Something

There is no bloodless myth will hold. — Geoffrey Hill

Anecdata are the stuff, amped with wit,
that poems are made of. Buber-Neumann, released
from a Stalinist camp, was bumped to Hitler’s version—
both accursed, the Communist’s worse: a hard-won
data point from a field study of damnation.
In whose grave is the despised soul freer?

If beauty shall emerge from our chaos, if free
order can form ex tohu-bohu, if human wit
will still find grace in profane machinations:
it will be a grace of God, who sticks close (His lease
still valid in happy jurisdictions): no one
but Him knows how to inch us, from our version

of anomie, toward insurgent order; how Sion
can rise from Jerusalem’s ashes or the free-
booting japeries of DC. All will be one
when we are each kin and kind, when will and wit
are redeemed by love, and the lost find release
in the sweet grass of the Lamb’s rumination.

*

Memory can outmaneuver the damnation
of being no more than a programmed version
of self, pliant and nullable; updates released
on schedule; overwritten ostinato by hope-free
struggle sessions. Pity the God-besotted wit,
lover of tragic pasts and piety, of won

quests and lost battalions, of the questions that none
are allowed to ask without rousing indignation
or risking cancellation; whose ready wit
is sanctioned for seeing hellholes in the versions
of Utopia sold us. In happier times, when free
thoughts thrive in kindness, when truth will have released

us from tyranny: under the Tree, on ground leased
with the very blood and virtue of the Holy One,
we will dangle feet in the cleansing Jordan, freely
wade in its light and wash away smug indignations
we copped on the cheap. Fix your heart, by conversion’s
sharp nail, to that bloody Tree. In the black box of wit

we call mind, let it free us from hallucinations
that heel us on a leash, from the zealotry of wan
political pseudo-Zions that murder wit.

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