The Temple

A temple stood on Wooster Street
Before the northern wall came down,
Embattled, breached and crushed by packs of babbling infidels
Rushing over the debris like frothing, half-demented dogs
Catapulted from the wilds of dark insensitivity and dirt.
A temple stood on Wooster Street
Before the annual invasions were begun-
The slow, methodical destructions of our gifts
As, some by most, our valuables and gods were carted off
To be dismembered, disemboweled
As they stole for their personal and paltry enterprises
The few mnemonic fragments they could barely understand.

A temple stood on Wooster Street-
Yet, properly, one might more truly say
A temple was one of the vaults that veined the gneiss,
Raw rock that paralleled the pavement; for it was not,
Like some sere antique architect's invention,
Struck up colossally astride the road,
And massive, nor walled across it to divert,
Or altogether sever, its progression:
This temple stood beside the way,
Down

three

gold

steps

And wore upon its flat, Egyptian head
Ascending sets of rooms-to-let,
A shabby, triple crown of commerce burdening its brow -
And yet it was a holy place of art,
And youth, and bright caprice,
Alive with sprays of flowers, flight and sex,
And musky aromatic offerings-
And duck.

"Ho! Duck? (you say) This man in mad!
What kind of archaeology is this . . ?
Some misinterpretation, we've no doubt;
A lacking glyph, some part of the cartouche left out;
How sad . . ."
Still, that's just the way it was
And, although no one does it anymore,
The Temple's Ra-day ritual included
poets, gods, goddesses, festivities, and duck!
golden and gaily sacrificed beneath
the benediction of our Thackery-
high priest and priestess of the fey retreat,
and most immortal of immortals there.
They don't make gods, and priests, and temples
like they used to;
But temples, priests and gods are really made, not born,
And when they fade and disappear
The world can only wait
Until it's time for them to re-become
And chase the half-gods, half-priests, and half-temples
Out of our corrupted dreams,
Making wholeness dominant again,
Correct our unbecoming
Cosmic dislocation
Make us sane.

Once there was a Temple,
And afterwards a flare of bare ground, pristine space
Which was erased with ugly, painted bricks
Where perfect heavens graced the air.
Once there were

three

downward

steps

Awash with sun, or early morning darkness,
Rain, flowers, snow and dancing feet -
But always, somehow, golden underneath.

Beyond the door,
Which stopped three steps from being four,
The main room of the sanctuary lay,
Unlike any chamber holy houses have today.
Over the sill, the parqueted floor
Spread right and left, ran wall to wall,
Beyond the shadow boxing of the doorway,
Abruptly ending, several paces on, creating a broad platform
Large enough for rituals, small plays and dramaturgic entrances,
For those who kept acquaintanceship with that declining grace.
Across the chamber, at its other end,
This terracing was magnified and mirrored
Where stood another sweep of wood, beneath an elevated ceiling;
Deeper, grander, suitable for all august occasions-
Dark and prophetic shades from ectoplasmic worlds,
Hermetic revelations, naiads, fauns, and Fates,
Abandoned celebrations
Commemorating long forgotten dates,
-and girls.

And over all presided Amen-Ra,
Phoenix-flamed, oracular and dream,
Solidified into a fragile flesh,
Authenticator of (not for) the gods,
Whose watery blue eyes looked out like those of some Tiresias,
Absconded with a treasury of secrets
From lost, uncalendared millennia of long before,
Seeing the deities (albeit in their new disguises)
Being anonymous among the endless anonymities of earth
Once more.

That was his metaphysic skill,
His unique, anagogic will;
Behind the grotesque masques of man, a kin,
He sought them and he saw them out.
No mere plasticity of skin, no altering of attitude
Could hide true immortality from his translucinating vision;
No sudden shock of renaissance, no arcanal amnesia
Could dull, or lull, these redivined divinities
In their renewed mortality,
Leaving them unaware of their exhuman essence,
But his wan eyes would single out each god,
See through the carnal shell of life a goddess had assumed,
Identifying them, even to themselves,
Anointing each with recognition,
As a pharaonic deity
As he be Ra returned,
Receiving others of his own, come back-
(The temporality, of course, was understood,
Like slipping down to Luxor for the Fall,
But, in the meantime, everything was good)
And life was not quite life, at all,
Unless it was a festival.

O. O. O'Hare was his Horus,
Adrian to him was Thoth,
And Paris he called Pan;
Silhouetted in Von Hensel's eyes there was something feral . . .
Bible-faced and sullen-souled Judith's Set was cold and sterile;
Isis re-emerged as Carol, Osiris was a tall, young man
Who tousled golden plumage every Spring,
Responding to a "Langhorn," "Jack," or "Chris,"
Or, even on one stranger April morning, "Maximillian Brown!"
But always with the curious imbalance,
For only an ounce of intellect,
Three thousand that of almost flawless flesh; however,
Through the view of Amen-Ra each was conceived,
Created and sent out to walk
(frequently a brief elation, to be sure)
Among a delightful convocation of the gods.

Nut stepped into the long-legged "Boots,"
Who lovingly fulfilled the rites her heritage assumed;
Billy, whose fingers gossomered the air,
While coroneting fashion in his hair,
Was the Oxyrhynchid (really not a god,
But only, some say, rather, part a god:
Or god of parts)
Yet, notwithstanding caveats he quite devoured the role
And stole away, leaving Osiris altered for his coming).

Saint Thackery, upon a great, carved chair,
(It, too, retrieved from some foul-odored alley,
Had been replushed and gilded as a throne),
Was royally ensconced and transubstantial,
Deital in manner, immeasurably gentle;
Ancient, ivory-boned, soft-nearly powdery-of skin,
Seen in repose, not unlike the intaglio of old Akhnaton
(The one in Cairo where the tilted head
Appears to have been pressed into the stone),
Always the giver, the definer, he obtained;
The altar might fail constancy,
But where the ageless patriarch still reigned
The Temple of our Amen-Ra remained.
Some gods are puritanical,
They sell salvation in the arid dying,
The withering away of meat and mind
Until denial has refined man into non-existence;
Other gods are ruthless and demanding,
Their worshippers must share their strength and strife
Taking and breaking game, earth, rock between
unfeeling hands which shape their leathery spirits
like crude saddles heaved on the brawny,
unshod steeds of life,
astraddle which the worshippers
gallop up to some black, craggy heaven,
long since vacated by some peripatetic deity.
Then, too, there are the un-god gods
Who really aren't divinities, in fact
Who may not be at all, or being
May be warm sap running up the early trees,
The west wind in the afternoon,
Or silence-heard.

Gods, gods-there are so many gods!
So many deities, aligned and lone-
Defended, adulated, and adored;
Grown old, abandoned and gone down,
Occasionally restored to echoes of their origins,
But usually forgotten and deserted for all time.
However, Amen's new celestials of Egypt,
Conceived and re-believed in his excited undulating mind,
Came like their Aegean counterparts
Rambunctious, unpredictable and bawdy,
Love-, laughter-, beauty-oriented and diverse,
Singing, roaring, heady with lust and wine,
A company of wild immortals bursting from sarcophagi of time
Like golden geysers from the marsh of death
Eliciting a bright electric breath
From some cool planet long described inert.

No, Amen's haven was no house of murmurs or of mummers,
No shuffle-footed chapel of the chant,
But rather was a carousel of doing
Where ritual was acting and desire,
Play was the thing and everything was play
And drama was the ceremonial way.
This most extraordinary galaxy of gods
Did what it wished to do, said what it had to say,
Each not-a-mime fulfilling his own constellation . . .
The play the thing and everything the play;
Everyone an actor, each one a creator,
And mad, immortal Amen-Ra
Directs his Temple Theatre.

Yet, if the Guild of Church seemed strange,
It was no more so than the tales portrayed;
Conceive a classical expression, devastatingly re-staged,
Exploded from the boards, flooding from the aisles,
Hoards of performers, shouting scattered words,
Concatenation of unstudied styles
Characterizing the absurd!
Decades before political plebian posturers
Ever said a bumblin' word.

On one occasion-dé jà vu, askew-
While we rehearsed The Lady from the Sea,
Thackery withdrew, then reappeared
Armed with a lengthy, lingam of verdant garden hose
The unseen end of which we apprehensively supposed
Was threaded to a faucet in the rear.
Gaily the first of deities targeted the tube into the bay,
Aiming at the sunken centre floor,
Calling cues-in all directions-
Ra gloried as he saw the water pour.
"We must have more reality," he cried,
"Are we not gods and not mere mortal men?
This play will take no artificial shore;
I will create a sea!
And on four side the stage will be no simulated briney edge,
No sedge; each ledge of wood will be a beach,
Reaching to the very feet of those Canutes
Who watch our drama here,
Real as a basic element can make-
As on the day the steaming earth was webbed by water
Cameoing continents and chalicing the seas.
Quick, forty pounds of sand, at once,
Go forth and bring me back some land
And I will set in motion
Beginnings of an ocean!"
With which he turned the nozzle on full force,
A shining stream of silver showered the recess,
As Thackery raised high his one free hand to bless
His vision-version of The Lady from the Sea,
Until, at last,
Some coward in the pantheon of gods
(No matter how immortal, there's one in every crowd)
Pursued the conduit back to its faucet source
Ending the fact and the emotion
Of Amen's ocean-
And, I suppose, the Temple from collapsing on our heads.

Topographical inversion was but one phenomenal effect
Found in his poke of merriment-
Take your philosophy, religion, sect,
Setting up its primate to be compared
And you will see no pinnacle of popery
Has shared the gay perfection of his lyric will,
Expressed like a wild goat emblazoned on a crag
In ultimate abandonment to chance,
The essence both the climber and the hill.

Sometimes he found a need to vary seasons,
Establishing the atmosphere required,
On which occasion he would introduce
A forest-full of brazen leaves, stored from a recent Fall,
Unconscious of a howling storm
Immediately beyond the Temple door.
Once it was a grove of ten-foot spruce
(An enterprise requiring half the holy cast,
A salvaged station wagon, and three days)
So that a scene set in a Russian countryside
Might be a sweep of Muscovy,
Instead of some crude ecological approximation.
Regrettably, August was extremely warm that year;
The evergreens grew dry and dropped their needles
(which was acceptable, they do such anyway when they're alive)
And no one could resist the impulse
to careen the fallen cones across the sanctuary,
with a swing foot and "Yo-ti-ho!"
Not only warm, that summer, it was hot.
And following a lively dress rehearsal
Someone lit with a discarded match
The brittle, dry tip of one cone of conifer
Flaming the boon of branch into a blazing bloom-
Which one alert divinity had sense enough to prune,
Fling to the floor, while several others (rather bachanalled)
Terpsichoreanally poured their wine
(was that a metaophor?) upon the burning brush,
Concluding the adapted Dostoevskyfor the nonce.
Those were the nights and days, the weeks, and months,
And years . . .

Frequently, the offering was Greek,
And even oftener Elizabethan,
But never was the vintage verse so rare
As when the mise en scene was of his own contrivance.
The Temple Theatre's version and diversion of its Church–
(Ah, Amen, woulds't that some sweet fragrant fragment
of those immortal manuscripts survived).
Master incoherencies of devastating insight:
George Washington and Shirley Temple (an angel of the house)
Walking through the 1939 World's Fair, with Kahn . . .
(Ghengis, Kubla, Aga, Otto,
the playwright changed it every night)
Discussing indecision in the dark of Opheus ascending;
Or Hamlet, sitting on the basalt wall that ringed
The circular fountain in the Village Square,
Just before the striking of eleven, saying:

"Methinks the thread of Shakespeare grows too thin
To hold the troubled soul of Denmark in control, tonight;
And if the poet can't ordeign the fete of his creation
Then, perhaps, it is too late for Hamlet to advise;
Not in our lies, but in our stars we may
Know that the knight foretells another day."

Occasionally the tempo of the theatre suffered interruption
And Wrights that were the essence of the play
-tranquility, performance, beauty, grace-
Fluctuated their unnormal rhythm, their pace was stayed,
Faltering for a moment in their pace,
But Churchy was above trip-footing with them,
Relaxed in body and composed in face.

Now, it might be pecuniary problems, or the landlady
Whose abode above invested her with numerous occasions
Suitable for granting the grand tour to friends and relatives
Through the accommodations she (with not a few misgivings) let
To that "you-just-will-not-believe-it tenentry ensconced below
Her champing curiosity and flat
(hovering like an ibis overhead)
While we, antiphonally, sang its praise in prayers
Appropriately read from our Book of the Dead.

Yet once-it seems that I recall it was in Summer-
The door exploded open like a curse unleashed
Upon some expeditionary violation of the vault
Sealed once when Amenhotep was the king
And Queen Tiy had a royal string connected to each finger;
However, I digress-
Uninvited, unannounced, under the effects of too much beer
The local incarnation of the Vandals
Came stumbling out of hoodsville street, four blocks away,
Looking for the girls they thought they sought-
(the kind they bought or caught in rapine rage)
And finding none consistent with their inclination and intent
They brought and vent the irritation of their personal denial
By ruthless, random sowing of self-hate,
Choosing with a coward's care of those
Who live on carrion and what the deem defenseless,
The safest victim fear would let them face
Upon whom physicality, brutality would prove
A confidence, a manliness, a sex,
Obliterating the suspicion even their poor minds perceived-
The one which faulted a fraternity
So intimately sensual in every aspect of association;
So many symbols needed to assure
The single mental image they erected
Was firm and pure-and theirs.

Galumphing down the three gold steps
They crowded on the platform at the entrance
Eight, nine, or ten, certainly no fewer,
And clustered indecisively upon the smaller platform,
Now, unsure in their violence and devoid-
They stared down at the half a dozen players
Idle with intermission conversation in the well-floor
Immediately below, and then at Thackery
On the further stage, artfully balanced
On a tall unstable looking tripod of a stool.

"A bunch of dirty artists, stupid squares-"
"Dumb squares, alright. Look, there's a goddamn fairy!"
(Which jarred the nerves of Oxyrhynchid Billy,
Who softly murmured: "Mother Dirt and clan . . .")
An ugly, swarthy, stocky thug proclaimed,
Throwing his arm around the shoulders
Of a tall, good-looking boy with olive skin,
Who smiled, replying in a light soprano
"It's such a sin that everything's so quiet,
This place needs some action-"
"It needs a fuckin' riot!"
This contribution came from someone slinking in the rear.
"No! No!
–the dialogue was broken,
Thackery's voice came gentle down the room.
The horde, astonished that the distant, slender
Little man, of all those there, had spoken
Turned and stared, uncertainly . . .
"No! No! -we need no fucking riot.
You must be thinking of the bacchanal
Found in the expurgated, incomplete,
Suppressed edition of the yet to be recovered play by Ovid,
Vividly depicting the Apollon rites of Wrong–
No. No.
Tonight, we are amidst a new rehearsal of dear Julius Caesar,
By the late and everlastingly lamented Bard.
However, due to the unplanned and unprofessional
dispersal of, I'd say, near half the cast
to sail in some plebian Chinese junk along the filthy river
Many of the glorious roles are now as empty as a nought
which no wise should be tolerated, yet, as we see,
You fine young men discover yourselves caught
In theatre, bringing us your talents to exploit.
We need no longer feel concern,
The skills not there, they'll quickly learn;
A reasonable adroitness in direction
Will more than compensate for any lack;
We will assume auditions, saving time–
We must return to being with the Bard,
Get back to Julius Caesar, and to Rome
Hurry, then, line up, and we will finish casting.
Yet, considering the ethnicity, we may end up
By being but half-caste. Oh, no mind . . ."

"The bastard's balmy as a bird,"
Observed one slotting into place,
A vacuous "who-me" smile upon his face.
Confounded, graceless, lumbering, and awed,
The uningratiating group came in a row,
Formed ranks before the royalty of manner
Upon which Thackery was borne,
Responding to directions from a god
Who understood both Reason and the Rod.

Ra ruled–
And by the time the week had turned about,
The sour-souled, raw pack, bad tempered and ill-starred,
Had acted in eight scenes, competing for good parts,
Had painted flats, and aided making props
And gotten used to waiting for a cue;
As well, they soon assumed the unrequested role of palace guard;
One even followed Thackery through the season,
Although he may have had more than one reason.

Shade by shadow, legends of the Temple
Scheherazaded through the years of nights,
And legions were the worshippers of spirit–
Seduction by the incense of delight,
The promise of the resurrective dream–
Youth ritual descended to the doorway
Down

three

gold

steps

In an unending stream, sought out the altar of the Amen Ra.
The law of codes immortal and once-written
Revoked to dust, amended into myth
Where Cleopatra murdered fifty centuries of state,
by luring Antony into her priceless grotto
and its foudroyant brilliance left the hero
him bereft of sight–
Leaving gods with no landfall on the earth,
And with no backward look they all forsook it . . .

Then Ra returned in Thackery Church,
Restored the Temple, where none had gone down,
And mined the disestablished deities
From flesh he found abroad-
That is, was god, again,
Prepared to reign, except he be attacked,
Assaulted, driven from the boundaries of body,
Blasphemed in his person, and denied!
In which event, Amen pre-decided
He would . . . he would . . .
The mystery for which there is no answer.
A Temple stood on Wooster Street
When such a place and time could be
A part of one's un-history,
Before the hordes, much multiplied
Exploded southward for the kill!
Summer went to Arcady,
Von Hensel to the West,
Judith went to Amsterdam,
And Carol went to rags-
The legends have it Adrian (readThoth)
Remained.

I will not tell you what became of Amen-Ra;
It was three things,
And all are true
And miracles.

Yet, I will tell you that the Temple was destroyed;
The shell by avarice, the altar by the scavengers of mind,
The ignorant, the ugly, and the foul-
Downed and dismembered by green-grimy fingers,
Made slimy by the essence of putrescence-violated!
Then Amen spoke, like all the tides of all the seas come in;
The spell was broken
And the Temple
And the Dream
Were gone.