Pavelspoetry.com
MUSIC MAKERS
Elderly clowns played music of brass
Below the foot of the swinging cross
(States of night were won and lost
Realms of moons were built and passed)
The starbright shrank to a neuter sphere
Leaked to vacuum a sable dust
Cities were clapped together by lust
Then fell apart in applauding air
All of the brightest celestial towns
Lived not longer than all the clowns
But when the eldest had blown a horn
Three days had come, three nights had gone
Pavel Chichikov
March 25, 1994
ON THE SHORE
The white curtain bulging with light
Pure, brilliant, a wavefront swelling
Overflowing, let us not see, the room
Not a place for dread and awe—
Outside, from where the curtain blows
The horses still snuff the grainy snow
Hoofing muck and thawed broken straw
And the black hills tucked up in blankets
Of white spume—
All sleeping, dark stone will never know:
Light is a wild spirit
And a sea of light races
Outside the kitchens of our small dwellings
Our proper places
Pavel Chichikov
March 28, 1994
THE THIRD HOUR
I heard him say “it is so painful, child,
Stay with me a little, speak no word”
The whispering went roughly from the tree
The precious limbs black-bleeding and defiled—
Black as empty night the hillside fell
A stone unlatched from stone away from heaven
Free-falling earth abysmal in its mass
A blacker angel gathering to hell—
Again I heard the whisper of his voice
In feeble torment rising from the cross
“Stay with me, it is so painful child
Alone to be in misery impaled”
Slow in dying, sunlight fell away,
Blackness in the middle of the day
Pavel Chichikov
March 29, 1994
THE GARMENT
A wandering preacher once was God
As he was then and now in heaven
He looked and was a living man
His garment of one piece was woven
He saw the valley of Jezreel
He climbed the hills above Sharon
The sea of Peter fed him fish
The lake had boats he sailed upon
He had a voice and hands and feet
He walked and laughed a human way
So when in God we see a man
We see the corpus and we pray
That with him we will seamless be
A garment of eternity
Pavel Chichikov
March 29, 1994
THE GARDEN
The footsteps pass away—the tomb is sealed
At once an inner darkness is revealed
A famished blackness swallowing the child
That Mary’s womb had ripened undefiled
See then protector angels, cherubim
And swords that dazzle light stand over him
Those watchmen sent before where Eden stood
To keep from dying hands eternal food
Pavel Chichikov
March 31, 1994
THE PROPHET
In a low dark place I hear him preach
A man who wears a crown of steel
Forerunner’s voice, forerunner’s speech
He lives in deserts of the real.
“You are the last, a human foam
On saline oceans of the State
And he before that burst the tomb
Will come again re-animate.”
Those who listen are the last
To live and see with human eyes—
The human age is nearly past—
They listen with a cold surprise
To hear that servants of the end
Should have deserved a royal friend
Pavel Chichikov
April 3, 1994
PROPHECY
The rolling wave of Easter brings
The wrack of future founderings
So great a resurrection breaks
The wall of time the present makes.
That which happens later casts
A wreckage on the shifting past
And some who walk along the shore
May find the relics cast before;
The leavings of the wreck of death
Lie scattered on the living breath.
Pavel Chichikov
April 4, 1994
VISION
Spider’s silk within the eye
And a web discreetly shining
All to catch the fleshly Birth
The Passion and the Saving
But every other blundering bee
Mosquito, gnat and crow
Will either break the fragile cords
Or small between them go
Rose of Sharon, Ruth of wheat
David of the bee
Joseph of the fragrant wood
Jesus of the tree
Caught within the spider net
Of all that I can see
Pavel Chichikov
April 5, 1994
CARPENTER BEE
Black-bellied bee, heavily freighted
Zig-zag in flight, pollen weighted
Cell in a tree, God created
Small in sight, divinely sated
God in a word, sent from far
Cell in a woman, seabright star
Straight as swords, light as prayer
Knowing heaven, dying here
Pavel Chichikov
April 6, 1994
APRIL
A wind of blood pumps up the ichor in the leaves
And tulip cups of blood dilate and overflow
The hyacinth and daffodil enlarge
And rains transfuse a southern imago
But April is the springing of the wind
Anaemic wind can veer and veer again
Pale spurts of rain coagulate to snow
And compass rose compels the weather vane
Bleed the north and let the south flow in
Drain out the freezing serum of the spent
Cadavers of the morgue of ice lie down
And carcasses of chilling dead relent
The corpses of the dying months are white
Green and red the colors of delight
Pavel Chichikov
April 7, 1994
THE TABERNACLE
Brother Christ, in your chest,
Do you spend the day alone
Sprinkled by the hours, blessed,
Blood and body, flesh and bone?
Assigned a sacramental box
As if a dog were kenneled in
You feed on flame and burning wax—
Contempt becomes primeval sin.
Flattered by a vulgar horde
A rabble splendid in disdain
And disregarded by the bored
You’re safe at least from wind and rain.
Pavel Chichikov
April 7, 1994
NATIVITY
The shepherds’ field is folded up
An altar cloth of rubbled mud
Melchisedek defiles the cup
The cow of madness chews her cud
Wicks of oak compressed by fog
Send up a rope of canceled murk
Another birth is cataloged
On human skin by Herod’s clerk
A child delivered upside down
Reclines on eucharistic straw
Astrologers from Babylon,
An ox and ass, lay down the law
While far above the stars emboss
The constellation of the cross
Pavel Chichikov
April 9, 1994
THE SCREEN
Don’t think she cannot reach you where you are.
A kremlin massive as the world
Weighed down the head of Our Lady of Tikhvin
But when I called she pierced
A hundred meters of Moscow stone
With a hymn on a silver flute.
Through death itself she hears your voice.
Pavel Chichikov
April 10, 1994
THE DESERT
I saw the clotted wounds and flagrant blood
And told him I was sorry for his trouble
(A confidential tryst of brotherhood
the two of us together in the chapel)—
Not half so bad as yours, I know you well,
A bitter childhood’s cruelty and fear
A scourge of Roman whips and half of hell
Attenuated in a dozen years—
But why not interfere since you made me
I could have used your help when I was small
But when I cried you weren’t there at all
What good is dying on a bloody tree?
And so we stayed discussing for a while
How life on earth is impotently vile
Pavel Chichikov
April 11, 1994
THE GARDENER
Brazen leaves defend the ground
Star of Michael bless the gloom
Autumn pacifists of oak
Baptismal rain anoint the town
Canticle of Simeon
Consecration bath of John
Cloud of crucifixion wait
Hang in silence, failing sun
I saw one live who died as wood
And though I did not recognize
The gardener, or even God
The risen one looked through my eyes:
Do not touch me till I rise
Pavel Chichikov
April 12, 1994
THE DOG
Just as it had done before
A dog came through an open door
In his mouth he held a rope
Doubled in a hangman’s loop
Beneath the gibbet was a trap
A hood, the garrote and the strap
The guillotine, the grill, the axe
The gouging spoon, the twisting rack
The funnel and the liquid lead
Electric chair, electric bed
The whip, the comb, the skinning tool
The boot, the maiden and the stool
Pincers, pliers and the fire
The knout, the club, the squeezing wires
The knuckle, knee and stamping boot
The bullet and the order “shoot”
Dagger, sword, the poisoned meal
Knife of stone, the knife of steel
All applied historically
By genuine authority
The rope of killing of the dog
Can either hang a man or flog
But Romans had a predilection
For animals and crucifixion
Pavel Chichikov
April 13, 1994
HYMN
We see him by the light
But he is not the light
He comes to us in darkness
But he is not darkness
He sees what lives and dies
He is not sight
He labors without force
He is not weakness
His will cannot be stayed
He is not violence
He speaks without a word
He is not silence
He has no form
And yet he is a man
He is eternal spirit
But died and rose again
He has all blessings and all qualities
And yet there is no paradox in these
As pure as love
He suffered for our sins
He died to life
And in him life begins
Pavel Chichikov
April 13, 1994
WHO ARE WE?
First of all a shifty ape
Replete with smutty pride, hungry, sensual
The rounded pupil of the animal
Narrowed by a squinting calculation
But self-aware, a grotesque horror of self-knowledge
The pristine selfishness of nature addressed by shame
Imperial, adamic, full of blame
A conscious carnivore, a freak
An opportunist omnivoric sneak
A killer and a savage master
Yet weeping with self-pity in disaster
What else, why should there be
In simple flesh emergent property?
Some incremental spiral of the brain?
Crystals build their towers, ants become a civil race
Polymorphic acids float through space
Unconscious termites build a mindless city
But only conscious beings palp their souls in pain
Or disregard self-pity and feel pity.
What enigmatic quality bred true?
There is not only me but also you
Pavel Chichikov
April 14, 1994
PRAISE
God hallow silence
It is not oblivion
My bones like rafters creak
My blood runs like rain
This is death, not silence
Bread of meditation
Wine of peace
Altar cloth of mercy
Eye of blessing
Homily of clouds
Eucharist of colors
Calyx of eternity
Silence of the wordless Godf
Pavel Chichikov
April 15, 1994
BREATH
Every day a little death
A slowing of the sleeping breath
And life itself inhales the sun
Breathes night the day’s comparison
And all the seasons in and out
Breathe rain and snow, exhale the drought
So then I would remember how
If all my breaths the glass would blow
I’d see my living come and go
With only mist on glass to show
Pavel Chichikov
April 15, 1994
THE PRISM
Toy soldiers simulacra of a war
A chestnut shell a coach of mice in reins
A praying mantis rampant lion vert
A dragonfly a rainbow manticore
All sympathies that massively exist
With mental implications of the same
Make possible devisings of a game
That may be played by God or atheist
For every object generates a thought
And thoughts themselves objectify in mass
Both those I seek and those I find unsought
Mark image and the substance of the glass:
The resurrection plays a game of skill
Where light imagines dying on a hill
Pavel Chichikov
April 16, 1994
THE SECRET
I saw the Church a cockleshell
The priesthood shrunk to half a dozen
The faithful in a catacomb
The civil cult a witches’ coven
The eucharist a hidden crumb
The cup of wine a thimble heaven
The word of God a secret code
The daily prayer in whispers hidden
But privately the Creed confessed
In blessing to a monstrous guest
And all the calmness of despair
Is cured by deep unfolded prayer
A living root, an ancient need
The parable a mustard seed
Pavel Chichikov
April 17, 1994
SURSUM CORDA
In hope I lift my heavy heart
In truth it is a faithless part
As you know well
What useless rage is evident
Despite a meekness of intent
I need not tell
Too little joy, too much of spite
More envy than naive delight
In others’ gladness
Often I have mortified
My hope in you but not my pride
And given in to sadness
Loved ones you conferred on me
I cherished too inconstantly
And then betrayed
Those who summoned me in grief
To comfort them and give relief
I long delayed
Mercy taken of your love
Has feeble strength to lift above
This heart in joy
Since I have no other power
Except the love which you endower
Lift this envoi
Pavel Chichikov
April 18, 1994
ASCENSION
Arms of dogwood dancing in the wind
Entranced by shifting nets of sepia shadows
And celandine, that loves an early spring
Drops a fragile batwing in the meadows—
Ancient silver days of chilling rain
Grown a fibrous stem and filled with green
And all the rising suns of morning come
Stronger grown than mornings we have seen—
White heat commands the parapets of summer
Looks down from where it sentries in the sky
And far away the dragons of July
Stretch their burning innocence and fly
So now while shadows catch and hold the light
Ascension’s season flames it blinding bright
Pavel Chichikov
April 20, 1994
HEALER
I have a wound that will not heal
That bleeds and festers without cease
I cannot see but I can feel
An anguish growing toward release
I have four less than you had once
Yet still as mortal as the five
And though my heart remains alive
My sin commits my soul’s affront
Although I suffer as you did
You suffered by your own consent
Both torment and abandonment
While I my freedom forfeited
Could I heal up my injured will
I would be whole and near you still
But since I cannot heal my wound
You come from death and make me sound
Pavel Chichikov
April 21, 1994
EMMAUS
Do not think he was invisible.
Thirty years before his death
In time’s infallible remoteness,
A fetus in the womb of capricorn
A golden bullet fastened to the solstice,
He fell away from heaven to be born
And traveled on his feet to find Emmaus.
Those who traveled with him knew his walk,
Familiar gestures, echoes of his talk—
It wasn’t necromancy caused an error
But lack of trusting faith and stone blind terror.
Pavel Chichikov
April 24, 1994
HE STOPS
It rained forever on the earth
The seasons washed the land away
The continents dissolved in salt
A virgin to the Lord gave birth
How God divided night from day
I heard an old man say
Peter told the tale to Mark
Apostle doubling as a clerk
Of how he walked upon a lake
Till panic made the surface break
How Teacher set the demons fleeing
And made the blind become the seeing
Revived the dying and the dead
And multiplied the fish and bread
But one thing Peter did not see
The Master killed on Calvary
Mother Mary stayed and John
Two other women looked upon
The execution of her son
But of the rest there wasn’t one
So only four would there remain
To hear the Rabbi groan in pain
And only four of them desired
To comfort him till he expired
No miracle dispelled the fear
That kept the rest from coming near
And though the Lord made time and space
He won’t compel the human race
To wipe the blood from off his face
Pavel Chichikov
April 25, 1994
THE MODEL
At 0300 hours, GMT
The 25th of April 1994 AD
Jupiter and Luna juxtaposed
Luna in a golden haze exposed
Jupiter a brooch above her plump left shoulder
And all the trees a bodice that did mold her
So beautiful a lady and so lush
That even kingly planets dared not touch
But all who lifted up their eyes could see
A silent and majestic orrery
Pavel Chichikov
April 25, 1994
GIFT
Seven leaves I cannot see
Flourished on a holy tree
The crown extended into heaven
Grew and dropped the ripened seven
First the chieftain Abraham
Who sacrificed an angel’s ram
Hearing God made no delay
Obedient his child to slay
An offspring and a progeny
Was given for his constancy
Moses in the bush had seen
Ever burning, ever green
The flaming tongue of God bespoken
Burning a celestial token
Smoke by day and flame by dark
Laws of stone, a wooden ark
There ran David, swift of foot
Resplendent king, savior’s root
Giant killer, lion’s bane
Befriending Saul and Jonathan
Seed of Israel’s kingdom come
Mourning over Absalom
Eliyahu of Carmel
Speaking doom on Jezebel
That also burned the dust and stone
Fired bullock flesh and bone
Was fed by ravens when the law
Apostatized for Asherah
Isaiah too received a vision
Of God and people in collision
But saw the crooked road made straight
The mountains leveled, love from hate
A servant suffering for the rest
Heart of Zion, cursed and blessed
A leaf of modest Miriam
The mother of the living lamb
An angel came to ask her leave
That she might holiness conceive
Her spotless womb with light to fill
And bear it of her own free will
The final leaf that shaded all
Wide and strong although it fell
The leaf of Jesus of the cross
Who took from death what Adam lost
And gave us back an evergreen
These seven leaves that I have seen
Pavel Chichikov
April 27, 1994
AS IF IN A WOMB...
As if in a womb formed of winter and night
Monks said the psalter in heavenly light
Waiting their birth they chanted and prayed
“As you were born so may we be made”
Bowing and praying the psalm of the wind
Homeless and warmless for all who have sinned
December the stable without roof or floor
Moonlight the angel who stands at the door
Trees are the shepherds and planets the flock
Born is the baby of heavenly stock
No where to live but the earth and the sky
Starlight his blanket, the psalms lullaby
Pavel Chichikov
April 29, 1994
THE WORD
I cannot remember, remember, remember
All prayer like a tide ebbs away
Hiss of foam, hiss of foam
Seastars of memory rigid, splay
And then the grey sea runs home
Over the channel floor, it will not stay,
Nothing will remember more
Formless like water, trapping every hour
In sediment of happenings before
The black priesthood of memory’s way
In a white chasuble, the reflected shore
And all of it preserved in the sea’s white cowl
The running wave is the memory
The wave is what will pray
Pavel Chichikov
April 30, 1994
MOTHER AND CHILD
Sometimes an infant sitting on a mother’s lap
Dandled and awakened from a summer nap
Fine hair curling, wisps arching in a breeze—
She wipes away the drool of sleep and lets him sneeze
Sometimes the infant swelling, bright and high
Becomes a dark lacuna of an empty sky
Far and unapproachable his precious eyes
Inconsolable the wisdom of the wounded wise
His mother of the virginal devoted sea
Hides him from the clutching of humanity
Hugs him out of reach, composed and grim
Not trusting to our mercy since we slaughtered him
Pavel Chichikov
May 1, 1994
DREAM
I wandered through the rooms upstairs
Where once I was a servant and a guest
But though the furnishings had been removed
And rubbish everywhere lay all about
(White dust and grey and crepe of dust
A frost of long disuse and precious time)
No new inhabitation was installed
No one could live or would live there—
In empty rooms white sun came in
To lie as dust lies on the floors and walls
But then I saw, all dressed the same,
Those travelers who would go home
But had no way of reaching home
Who desperately desired to depart
But could not leave, could not be helped by anyone
And though I had my way I would not start
And stood there watching helplessly
While dreaming broke my homeless heart—
My heartless dream would not let go
Or take me home again
Pavel Chichikov
May 1, 1994
THE TRENCH
I drowned to see Leviathan, that old cadaver
Crocodilian, hid inside his lather
A corpse, I’d thought before, a mythical offense
Against the law of scientific sense
But all us drowned explorers see him once
Sleeping in an oceanic trench
Shifting through his lapidary flanks
Stretching out his starry toes and shanks
Gaping bludgeon jaws half-conscious in his sleep
Thank goodness for the living world his bed is deep
How long has he been waiting there in ooze
When will he wake up—and at what news?
We drowned ones have no fear of him—or of mistakes—
Yet I would not drift as close again—suppose he wakes?
Even the immortal drowned and dead
Paddle in a silence round his head
Pavel Chichikov
May 2, 1994
SACRAMENTS
The bread and wine are not by magic made
Nor since transformed by magic into God
Nor are his blood and body now displayed
By efficacious posture or by word
Nor do the saying of the psalms or letters
By sonic resonance or length and breadth of wave
Have any force transformative on matter—
Nor has assent to doctrine potency to save
But only by astonished grace of love
By which all state of being is devised
And only by the sacrament unproved
That all beyond their perishing shall rise
We know of him who did not come a wraith
Whose potent love does not compel our faith
Pavel Chichikov
May 3, 1994
MURDER
All killings of convenience
The civil or in battle
no deaths exempt from this
Explicit law of earth-born souls
No martial rules
Or state’s expedience:
For killing there’s a debt to pay
For killing there’s a skull
to wear around the neck
A skull as heavy as the earth
To drag until rebirth
May take the weight away
Pavel Chichikov
May 4, 1994
TREE
Sometimes a sun, a point of light
No shape or disk, not far
As if the sea
Rippling in the starlight
Heatless, moveless
Formless, depthless
Out of time
Had grown a tree
I cannot climb
All one
From root to star
Pavel Chichikov
May 6, 1994
THE WINDFALL
A fallen nest of sticks and mud
An oval couch of twigs and wood
To keep a northern robin warm
In slanting of a late spring storm
The bird-shaped hollow of the nest
With moss and fussy shoots is dressed
Made tight enough for birds on eggs
With feathers fluffed to fold their legs
The eggs are speckled grey on blue
Oval shells, none out of true
And snug in nest as nut in shell
The nesting robin warmly dwells
Or dwelled in one I found today
And so my soul may fly away
And leave my body on the ground
As if an empty nest were found
Pavel Chichikov
May 7, 1994
SOULS
Unapproachable dim star above the tabernacle
You bring the dead to us in dreams
Those reconciled to death
To see we are not reconciled
Not knowing that we are signs
And sacraments to them, the living penitents
The candle burns above us, now behind us
Whispering, but when we turn, the darkness
Takes its place—
Those who are the living
Hover and address us in the watch of candles
White shadows of the lighted cross
And we the dead surmise that something present
But unseen
Has spoken words addressed by light:
“You are the dead but shall be living,
Watching in the night”
Pavel Chichikov
May 7, 1994
THE CLOWN
I did not look when paschal bread was broken
And portioned to the thirteenth dish
Or hear the two commandments spoken
Or share the sacramental fish
I did not raise the living dead
Or sit at Cana when they wed
I turned the soil and cultivated shadows
Kept my cloak and did not strew the flowers
Stayed clear of boats, the sudden storm
Avoided crowds and all unnecessary harm
Did not provoke authorities
Or cure the ill and maledicted
And all calamities predicted
Were not for me ordained catastrophes
Because I went abroad to Egypt when
Vespasian’s legions razed Jerusalem
A clown by grace may yet be saved
If not maliciously depraved
Unconscionable fools may never learn
But even sticks do service when they burn
Pavel Chichikov
May 8, 1994
MIGRATION
Saints of all the times and places
Assembled in Alphonsus’ church
Like doves they occupy their niches
Cooing as they show their faces
Or perch like eagles on their pulpits
Preening angels’ ivory pinions
Or like the Virgin and her Poppet
Conveyable they sit on platforms
Fixed with arrows, clutching keys
They huddle griddles to their bosoms
Earless listen to the chants
Noseless smell the spreading incense
Still, they linger to advance
From chancel and along the nave
To some unvisionable dance
A bright migration rising in a wave
Pavel Chichikov
May 9, 1994
THE PLEDGE
I now believe and yet do not believe
See and hear my faith and yet do not
Walk, run and fly though standing still
Live, breathe and grow while members rot
You know I love as though I broke a stone
And know I pray as if a sound were prayer
I live in you and willfully alone
I cannot feel your presence and my fear—
Where have I come from that you save my life
Where die that feel no faithful love of you,
Between your heaven and my nothingness
I loathe my falsehood yet reject the true—
Though pledges of your flesh my hand has broken
Your word and blood I still receive as token
Pavel Chichikov
May 10, 1994
THE DREAM
Before time you were, and after time will be
Each day a wall that closes in
And we remain enveloped by your wings—
But did I see a dream, that reach of hill
That droops like flayed skin from Malaya Lubyanka
Where God bleeds in sleep
To an arch of pitted chrome?
It was a dream in which I saw
November twilight press down the great square
In grey half-being—
And in that dream
Death’s temple stood behind my shoulder.
There is no precognition, but only you
Who know what we have never seen.
Pavel Chichikov
May 11, 1994
BENEDICT
I saw Benedict of the white robe—
In the garden birds sang clotted song
Wishful birds sang melodies extemporized
Barriers of roses dropped long thorns of pain
Cloistered Benedict gave morsels to the rain
As if the drops were creatures and would rise
Who would breach that wall to bring him out
No one in or outside could be living
How see I flames of what has yet to be
Though long ago I heard the detonation
No future time exists unless imagination
Has other eyes to see
One or two are left, the others dead
To grow again perhaps in that rose bed
Pavel Chichikov
May 12, 1994
MONSTER
(after W.W.)
There lies the city blinking at the sun
A chimera of beasts just waked from rest,
Its limbs stretched out toward nightfall in the west
Its eyes already sparkling where dun
Shadows fill the precincts of the moon—
The buildings show the night their milkless breasts
And bait the sky with sexless barrenness;
Beneath the fouled rock it sends one
Solid root, metastasizing greed
That spreads through every organ of the earth;
Across the streams it throws a filthy seed,
A fruiting body giving mushroom birth
To lumps that make the ailing rivers bleed—
And all that mighty bulk expands its girth!
Pavel Chichikov
May 14, 1994
TRUCE
High summer is coming
The useful, languid heat
Luxurious and enervating
Flowers, trees
Ludicrously rich in leaves
Their seeds complete
Be unmoved
Because of reason
Watch the grey clouds
Cow dumb with sleep
Lean their shoulders
On the white horizon
This heaven
Of no reward
Purgatory
Of no blame
Cuts off my head
With no sword
Undulant far waves
Of bridled heat
Come riding in
Cavalry
Of milk white plumes
And no retreat
We would be wrong
To fight this war
Pacifistic indolence
And short memory
Move little
And fight no more
The heat rolls in—
Let the cream
Of memory congeal
And let
The whey of kindness
Rise with the steam
Pavel Chichikov—May 15, 1994
THE SPRING
Life is a top which whipping sorrow driveth
—Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke
Life’s a top which whipping sorrow spins
A whirling gig of fondness and farewell
A torque of death that winds around the stem
Which life releasing runs our anguish well
At close of life it wobbles and spins down—
And that’s as much as any saint has known
Except for those who once invited grace
To eat and drink a fondness and farewell
And stared instead to see a cherished face
Unperishing, impossible to kill
And that’s as much as any saint has known
Who reads a falling memory set down
Can those denying this deny the pain
And pain denying spring to life again?
Pavel Chichikov
May 17, 1994
THE EMPEROR’S CHILD
Crowned griffins rampant
Messengers on horseback
Sound the hunting horn
Gallop down the track
Omnipotence is born
Let him nothing lack
To keep him warm
Coldly in the wood
Underneath a willow
Bedded down in straw
Baby on a pillow
Herald is a crow
His fanfare is a caw
Announcing sorrow
Where’s the sacrifice
If sorrow never shows
Baby in the wood
Covered by the snows
Angels see a face
That no one knows
In that dark place—
God send your grace
Pavel Chichikov
May 17, 1994
THE PULLOUT
“...if any bad results follow, they will be too late to affect the election.”
—H.R. Haldeman
A ragged feast of snarling bones
Scavenger’s lament
The carcass was a country
And the smell was devil sent
Foraged from the abdomen
A foreign insurrection
Bolted expeditiously
To nourish the election
The closest to the fond remains
Were served the biggest plate
And those who fell in battle
Were the diet of the state
Pavel Chichikov
May 18, 1994
APPARITIONS
Mary fell on greyish ice
Near St. Pimen’s church on Seleznovskaya—
An angel helped her, saying:
“There, there, go slowly dear,”
And led her to Tikhvinskaya
And then, in summer, I saw her bowing
To the Icon of Our Lady of Tikhvin
Old and pale and thin
Watching near the sanctuary
Where Jesus lay awake
And in October when I called for help
While buried in Taganskaya
She made an angel play the flute
While she herself was changing kopeks
In a subway booth
Pavel Chichikov
May 19, 1994
THE GREAT PRAYER
White rain changes form to make blue sea
And light makes fish of many changing scales
Earth of iron builds a wooden tree
And nitrogen turns diatoms to whales
But which transforming program gives the cue
That changes shrimp to whale and white to blue?
Sorrow in a thrush can sing to joy
And dancing in a circle rush to gladness
Unitary stamping marches war
And murder of a child provokes to madness
But which transmuting happiness is moot
That animates a sparrow and a flute?
No world of things and substances whirls here
It is instruction answering a prayer
Pavel Chichikov
May 19, 1994
ut potui, non sicut volui
THE BLACK DOOR
Sometimes as blue as cobalt, sometimes green as jade
Scintillating diamond stabs the wavelets
If only we could reach the other side
The side of the sun, we should not fade
Attenuating, we have not long to be alive
We must achieve the other side before the sun
Abandons this long, silent lake—
And us, who have not said our final rejection
We would be deathless utterly forsaken
Drifting in the sky above the flat water
Dayless and nightless, without true selves
Grim sky fragments, unreachable forever—
But who has placed this iron door above the lake
From wave to sky, featureless and obdurate
We cannot pass above, below or break
The cold eclipse of death
We must go through somehow—
Mother of the God of light
Lead us through the black door, whose shadow grows
The sun is falling now and will not wait
Pavel Chichikov
May 23, 1994
MOTHER
With a large hand the waves push me under
Nothing moves except the sea
And nothing breathes but the water
Inside her murmuring womb
I am submissive, helpless
Blue-eyed mother
Rock me back and forth
In the arms of heaven
White birds live in the folds
Of your blue robe
Winds comb your wavelet crown
Pavel Chichikov
May 25, 1994
SELF-STEERING
The helmsman beats the sea
With foam and milkwhite jade
And every wind of torsion
Receives the helm’s correction
No twisting or evasion
Eludes the plunging track
No providential sin
Avoids the chasing wind
Maintaining his direction
The helmsman steers the ship
And nothing can deflect
Not force or intellect
No compass does he need
His rudder is the Creed
Pavel Chichikov
May 25, 1994
FIREBIRD
A beat of wings
Rock hard and thunder crashes
A bird of air
Springs up aloft
Ungrips its talons from the earth
And lightning flashes
A hundred miles from wing to wing
Spread your pinions black as rain
And beat them, flashing, once again
Pavel Chichikov
May 25, 1994
DEATH AS A BROOM
A picture of a landscape made of wood
Carved of wood
And sawed from wood
So all the pieces of the wood
Irregular in shape and size
Are scattered on a table top.
A poem is a jigsaw puzzle
Made from the world
Carved from the world
And sawed from the world
So when the poet dies
All that remains is dust
Beside the poem—
Sweep the dust away
But keep the pieces joined together
Pavel Chichikov
May 27, 1994
JOKERS’ HEAVEN
Train butterflies to carry weights
Teach ancient trees to flounce in step
Use centipedes to carry freights
Eat jumping beans when overslept
When all has come to pass and gone
Be singular and carry on
For what care you what others say
All condemnation goes the way
Of continents and flies of May—
Though even crimson hell cools down
And senile octopuses drown
And red gardenias rot to brown
The Lord has no redundant clown
He makes his angel jokers kneel
On blessings of banana peel
Pavel Chichikov
May 27, 1994
THE HARVEST
On the hillside near the granite stones
Daisies, phlox and honeysuckle grow
Artificial roses never sow
Such sorrow for these sentimental bones
Gathered in a moment in a field
Faded in the sunlight of an hour
Monuments of granite never yield
Affinities of such eternal power
Donations of the grave are such as these
Seed to sun to innocent decay
All dust and nothing left that once was pleased
To grow and breed and blow all in a day
Glean the mortal flowers for the tomb
Where daisy, phlox and honeysuckle bloom
Pavel Chichikov
May 29, 1994
THE SOUL’S COMPLAINT TO THE GRAVE
Pack yellow straw about the gravemound.
The cold rain seeps and soils the coffin
And the earth shifts with the downpour
Of strong heavy rain on the winter ground.
Not yet has the earth been spread
As the white rain of March turns black
By nightfall and the tucked grave
Unfolds and slides like the shift of a cold bed,
Sinks with my coffin. Darkness blends me with the frost.
Who will warm this trembling soul
As it lies unburied on the steep hillside;
Or is it blind by death and winterlost?
Then like a father gathering comes one
Who finds and warms me like the risen sun
Pavel Chichikov
May 31, 1994
THE SURPRISE
In the sunrise, inhuman song, black-winged gull and man-of-war
Appear as if by sublimation from an eastern region
Floating droplets on a wave of infinite submission
Grace in bounded birth, annihilation
Soaring, soaring, small heads swiveling
Their eyes more watchful than any star can be
Inhuman brains, victorious, for nothing here
Can murder or be cheerless or watch for any eucharist
Of what already offers up the yellow dawn
The standing wave of the Real Presence.
Above the deck, all balancing on moving staves of air
Notes that play again, again a round of genesis
They ride the organ fugue of oceans—
And those who watch the sky are something free
Those squat and bifurcated blunt immortals
Ponderous, they are a form of burdensome divinity
Who watch the graceful birds above the deck
Pavel Chichikov
June 2, 1994
TABERNACLE
Unlock the door—that is enough—
Swing through space the temporal gate—
Remove the self that lies within
Forever in the immediate,
Offer love that sin rebuffed—
Burn incense to what has no sin
Sanctify in memory
Flesh and blood that took on form—
Pay what debtors could not pay
Offering their sinful harm—
One who in His agony
Gives up their sin on Passion day
Moves aside the temporal door
Of what will come and came before
Pavel Chichikov
June 3, 1994
FROM THE TABERNACLE
One swing pulls out the temporal door
Of what will come and came before
A sanctum of unleavened bread
Displays a timeless food instead
And passions, places and events
Displaced by passion’s immanence
Stand wide about the altar table
A boundless sphere, unchangeable -
Dressed in robes of endless day
Are courtiers of heaven’s play
And all of mass and energy
Released by sacrifice go free
And all of endless time and space
Ascends in fire from that place
Pavel Chichikov
June 3, 1994
THE MEMORY
All joy and peace remembrance —but of what?
Between two lemon trees there is a shrine
Between the stem and pistil of a flower – petals of a savage rose
And fingers of an amber honey clasp magnolia skin;
Sunlight pours down from heaven’s crystal jar
And like an amber fast imprisons death;
Watch as if in amber death held fast
While clouds of blue-winged morphos
Cover cloud-winged skies;
No dream that we are dreaming now
All clear and wakeful peace
All pleasure beyond pleasure without cease
And one who is our garden and our all
And whom before his shrine I do recall
Pavel Chichikov
June 4, 1994
THE DWELLING
Where is hell—how am I here?
By murder, theft or fornication,
Seasoned graft and perjury
Rapine, cheating, base extortion
Treason, bribing, twisted sex
Inconstancy, a false sworn oath
Blasphemy or sacrilege
Seduction, heresy or both?
Inside a separate dwelling place
Endless antiseptic rooms
Like hospitals and mortuaries
No penumbra, night or noon
Each spectre has a solid clone
To each a hell, and each alone
Pavel Chichikov
June 5, 1994
CLIMBER
An iron ladder planted in the ground
And angels scrambling up and down on treads
Material they seem when near the earth
When further up they’ve stars instead of heads
The ladder too is changing as it climbs
A ferrous, stained construction down below
But then it’s silver, aurum and electrum
Ascending in a stratospheric glow
And all at once I’m climbing to the sky
Laborious and clumsy, limbs asleep
The earth is close and heaven is so high
The angels rise in weightless bound and leap
And nothing but forever will suffice
Unless a cable falls from paradise
Pavel Chichikov
June 7, 1994
GUARDIANS
What is the name of one
Who walks so close beside me
The wings of sunrise ochre, gold, and green
Harmonics of the sun
I see the form askance
But when I turn to speak
It moves beyond my vision
Retreats when I advance
Sometimes the warmth of one
Who walks so close beside me
The rippling of my nape
Attracts my dull attention
How can I ever know
Eternal forms of life
Transfinite modes of light
Unless my spirit grows
They are for those who see
That loving company
Without whose brilliant kind
The lens of sight is blind
Defend us, brilliant ones
Who walk so close beside
You no vision sees
No vision hides
Beggars of the sun
Our souls concealed in you
But when we turn and look
The light shines through
Pavel Chichikov
June 8, 1994
THE SILENT ONE
Who knows the cenotaph
With many doors of bronze
Each one cold and shining
With a metallic hinge?
Who knows a secret?
Beyond the inner door
No shining metal there—
A square stone floor
Underneath a flag
A pentecost of gold
Touched by no one’s death
Born though never old
Who sees the chamber
That never was defiled?
Secreted from danger
Lives a silent child
One who has the key
Often enters there
Kneeling with his ear
To the silent square
Pavel Chichikov
June 8, 1994
SEVEN SEVEN
Here, take this box old son—
See, I’ll pull it apart for you—
Violet indigo green and red
Yellow orange and blue
Seven modules for the compass rose
For the compass rose of stars
Binary triplet neutron pulsar
But also planets like Mars
Reality comes from all directions
You put it together from parts
With help from the maths and sciences
And a dozen or two of the arts
I jammed them together roughly
In a manner of speaking but then
More of them seemed to be spreading about
Increasing by powers of ten
How many colors, how many shapes
Recurrent irregular make
Brains and minds and species of things
The beautiful ugly and fake
Primary colored spectral sevens
Simple in shape in a plane
Now generated a double fetch
Of infinities over again
Pulsing, endless the pieces came
Material mental in one
See, I’ll put it together for you
Here, take this box old son
Pavel Chichikov
June 9, 1994
THE WINDOW
Something’s coming, he said
Something I see in the yellow wall
In the black eye between drifting clouds
On the edge of the field
At the border of the garden
In the monumental buildings
Outside the railroad station
Inside the wheels of the train
Spinning in the iris of the white spirals
An interregnum of worms
Young forms arise
Hatch a government of white grubs—
These were human beings, once, he said
But something’s coming
Pavel Chichikov
June 10, 1994
THE HUNT
A she wolf running the black field
Quartering ground, hunting earth
A world is blind with burning labor
She cannot deliver a child
Death expelled from quaking womb—
Pinched the foul still born lava
Our nemesis, infected offspring
What we corrupted, caused to flow
Panting she bitch sniffs the ground
Flaming skin of spoiled redemption
Gorged the seething afterbirth
Red tongue burns in feeble starlight
Her nostrils pour out fetid smoke
And vomit streams from stinking jaws
Pavel Chichikov
June 12, 1994
MEDUSA’S HEAD
Medusa had a savage thatch
Of writhing serpents, eyes to catch,
A face that with a glance alone
Could turn a living thing to stone
Each eye a lost futurity
Detached eventuality
And every serpent in her knot
Was what could be and what is not
But knowing Perseus instead
Refused to look, cut off her head
Pavel Chichikov
June 13, 1994
THE RACE
I fall behind, my shadow runs
And though I am too short to say
The mockingbird, my double, sees it
Sliding through the narrow way
The mockingbird, a chimney sprite
Keeps spurting out a smoke of tunes
And though the sun is ageing fast
The chant prolongs the afternoon
A stain of berries on the ground
Completes the darkness of the shade
And there my shadow joins the dash
Of pigment that the sun has made
So too our bodies run to earth
The darkness of immortal birth
Pavel Chichikov
June 14, 1994
MOON
If above the earth a human head
Shone as if a moon were hanging there
A spirit drifting, raising out of lust
And sea a sympathetic mimicry
Then what logos moving air
Would sing a psalter of creation
And flood with borrowed light a sterile ocean
Pulling tides of anguish from its bed
The skull decapitated from its soul
Has living eyes diminished to a hole
And though it shines as ivory does in space
It never lights the darkness of its place
As though a spirit stirring in the deeps
Were darker than the chaos where it sleeps
Pavel Chichikov
June 15, 1994
EGG
A band of thunder stiffens round earth’s head
A brand of lightning flashes in her eyes
Blue irises are seas, her brows the land
Her nostrils are the forests dilated
She who once was peaceful spun alone
Between a sulphur venus and her mars
Effulgent blackness of an empty zone
Had fortified the chasteness of her egg
But now by force an embryo breaks through
And cracks the vast integrity of shell
The continents receding from a wound
That constitutes eruption of a hell
And all that endless magnitude of wing
Unfolds and covers chaos that it brings
Pavel Chichikov
June 16, 1994
MOUNTAIN
The sky displays a face of morbid rock
Thunderclouds raise up rebellious sound
Cauterizing wire is the light
That splits the seething ridges from the ground
Who scales those cliffs of slow-revolving rain
What pitons hold the surface of the storm
Inside the boiling carapace of wind
Disfigured faces flesh with booming pain,
Clamber, kicking, sole of foot on face
Panting, rising higher in a race
To reach the far divine serenity
Whose overhanging innocence they see
So far above, the summit of the storm,
Its clean celestial peace an ivory bow
And all the climbing figures from below—
Eternity’s ascent can do no harm
And yet these angels blustering with pride
In turbulence assault the mountainside
Pavel Chichikov
June 18, 1994
SUMMER MASS
For M.C.
Phlox and yarrow on the road
Stalks of yarrow thrust their suns
Toward one great sun and nacreous
Flowers ring the matin fields—
Morning censes, genuflects,
Sings a hymnal pleasantly,
Polyphonic silent wings
Bees of gold if they were heavy
Pray in lambs’-ears and in lilies,
Offerings of feverfew
Rise in one tremendous show
Of innocent unconscious praise,
Even those who never grew
Will rise beside his road always
Pavel Chichikov
June 19, 1994
POSTERITY
Bee-creatures living in a blue steel hive
Rotating sphere of hexagons in sable space
Each colonist secreting waxen plugs of thought
And honey of the pleasurable present
Each one, no eyes are necessary,
Sees through organs of electric sense
And all together susurrate in mental rhythm
As if translucent wings of stimulation shook
In dry transparent syncopation, and the hive
Contains a core in which the queen of queens lays eggs of thought
Her mental body straining to produce a reason to exist—
Which is your descendant—can you tell one from another?
No one except the queen has got a sex or brother
Pavel Chichikov
June 20, 1994
THE ROAD
Purple clouds of larkspur in the dusk
A purple ghost upstanding in the dark
There a road runs by the berry bush,
Lightning beetles levitate and spark—
A highway open only to the few
Who pay the toll of visionary night,
Beetles drift with tapers and the view
Is indistinct except for second sight—
Along a road that curves behind a sun,
Skirts the building of the polar star,
I see a sentry standing and the far
True road of pilgrims walking one by one—
How they go is worth a human pardon
Because they get there walking through the garden
Pavel Chichikov
June 20, 1994
NURSES
Last night the ivory petals of magnolia
White shavings of a sensual full moon
Convolved and fed their heavy sugared milk
To nursling moths and beetle brood
In sunlight now as brown and soft as leather
They fold themselves like nuns inside their leaves
Their contemplation of the night is over
And they fold and pray their seeds
Pavel Chichikov
June 23, 1994
CROSSROAD
A fine brown spider wandered through my papers
Her supple limbs testing for a foothold
And her palps thrust forward, imaging the contours
Of a rugged fibrous map of ink and whiteness
Where did she come from, did I bring from outside
This lanky curious stranger—or from another place
To wrap my inner, apathetic world
With unseen glory, cryptic energy and form?
Visitants appear and disappear, angels, demons
Apparitions, messages and signs
And then with one bright wave of sunshine
All disappear again, regaining shadows
One night a patient cross stood upright in the hallway
Stiff as any monopod or angel
But this one dangles from a string, moves on
As if the world is nothing but a crossroad
Much better that we bless all unseen things.
Openly they cross the straight road that we travel
On their way from darkness to the borderland
Where seldom any human dares to go
Looking neither to the right or left
We go on blind, nor do we see
Bright figures float on spectral wings
Above immense but unseen trees
Pavel Chichikov
June 23, 1994
THE MADMAN PRAYS
I have food—I am unwell
I have sleep—I have no rest
Thunder drawls from east to west
What prayer it is I cannot tell
The moon’s instruction rounds an O
Silver words come from her mouth
She strings her beads along the south
But what she says I do not know
Do we pray and hear those words?
Do we hymn without a sound?
With coronets the moon is crowned
She is the queen of silent birds
You who live inside my head
You who live outside my heart
Tell my voices to depart
Sing your melody instead
Lift my hands and press the palms
Together as I meekly pray:
Let me sleep and rest today
And listen to your psalms
Pavel Chichikov
June 24, 1994
MYSTERY
Black-bellied bees that live in senile apple trees
And dauber wasps that build their nests of mud
Golden scarabs bound for the Hesperides
And rowing bugs, survivors of the Flood
All arthropods that run on many legs
Have two or three part shapes with compound eyes
Termite queens that lay a billion eggs
Predatory ants and dragon flies
Lobsters, crabs and scorpions of the sea
Springtails, mites and spiders of the land
Cicada grubs that lie beneath the trees
Crabs of coral reefs that live in sand
Noble forms, another sort of plan
And yet he put a soul in woman, man
Pavel Chichikov
June 25, 1994
THE FIRE
There is an undertone
God hears a voice
But we do not
Not loud enough
Years blow like winds,
Restless ones, waves take their print
Roll on—
We hear wind
Rushing in the dusk
To the house at the end of time
Who lives there?
A light
A window
And nothing more
The wind returns
The fire blazes
Years burn up
And give their light
Pavel Chichikov
June 25, 1994
LOST
Two small rooms, one up, one down
Walls of paper, dingy, dark
Outside the door I am disowned:
“You don’t live here, get out of town.”
But later, coming back I see
Across the rooftops, walls of gold
The tenement becomes a block
Magnificent and very old
But what’s the street, no way to find
The bottom of the hill I knew
Altered, strange the city is
A labyrinth without a clue
Golden as the risen sun
Massive as another sky
And like the sun unreachable
The palace always seems close by
Easier to find a place
With residents who have no pity
Than palaces with golden walls
That disappear, in this strange city
Pavel Chichikov
June 26, 1994
SCHISM
A tired tree, some branches dead
Puny apples green as jade
With leopard spots, like watered silk,
Cream in color, neatly made
Black and wizened, gnarled and stooped
The dotard drops the fruit too soon
As if incontinent and beggared
Before the final week in June
Near the trunk the clover flowers
Draw the dancing of the bees
As though a crowd of busy children
Played beneath its senile knees
Cat birds mew from scaling branches
Mockingbirds play liquid flutes
Deep below the growing grasses
Larvae gnaw the ancient roots
Flogging blizzards, shrouds of ice
Desiccation of July
Still the apples fall away,
Leave the living tree to die
Pavel Chichikov
June 26, 1995
VIRGIN MOON
after Robinson Jeffers
But no flamboyant holocausts appear
To see the race of humans off to after-
Life, instead the ageing planet’s jaw
Collapses, falls and grows another tooth
Replacing stumps of splintered himalayas;
Liquid eyes of oceans close and then
Blink once more to see a virgin moon
And mouths of canyons long since worn away
Split wide open, laugh an aeon long
And nothing will be here to think of us
Remember us, or contemplate our cities
Though some of earth delivered will be green
And some relapsing soon enough be sterile
That now our blemished satellite must pity
Pavel Chichikov
June 28, 1994
SHELTER
Upsidedown it sleeps beneath the daisy
Back bowbent, the smoke-grey wings are folded,
Holding to the green cup of the ovary
Still body striped with yellowblack
How does it sleep?—dreaming of the bergamot
A wheel of hornshaped chambers and the nectar
Sweet and viscid on its long proboscis
Dipping, stretching, probing in the
Wells of lavender and ivory, smelling dusky
Round it goes, each anther like a tower
Somnolent it smells the flower
Under beams of snowy petals
But does not move the sleeping wings
Or twitch the claws of sable wire
Pavel Chichikov
June 28, 1994
STRIDER
Those iron boots make frightening noises
A giant comes they call July
His face an angry cumulus
A flash of lightning in his eye
But on his way the giant goes
Exposing miles of boiling back
And leaves a trail of daisy heads
And bergamot along his track
He covers ground in giant steps
From city park to garden patch
And where he leaves his sodden footprints
Flowers bloom and insects hatch
His legs are long, he strides a mile
Then out to sea to rain a while
Pavel Chichikov
June 29, 1994
CLIMBERS
Cats along the alley walking
Yellow fangs and eyes of glass
Mockingbirds detect the movement
Finches, starlings watch them pass
Heavy bellied, striped and tabby
White and black and tortoise-shelled
Predators although they’re flabby
And only one or two are belled
Gliding through the summer sunlight
Hugging shade beneath the trees
Waiting for the dark of night
To hunt beneath the Pleiades
Then silent, climbing heavenwards
Eviscerate the sleeping birds
Pavel Chichikov
June 29, 1994
PRAYER
All messengers are angels, and the lesser ones are
Thermal-riding hawks, foreboding crows and ravens
Agile swifts, athletic gulls and plunging pelicans
Cranes that lumber and the geese like cannon-shot
From silent catapults, ducks on analeptic wings
And furtive, dapple-shadowed wrens and finches
But greater ones ascending from the mind
Do not appear in motion but impel our motion—
Migrate nowhere, feed nor build a nest
Nor sing to hold supremacy of trees—
They rise through us into our eyes
And fill the world with sovereign surprise
And then with light uncommon they ascend
In ways no bird or human comprehends
Pavel Chichikov
July 1, 1994
THE GATE
Who would drive the dead like swine
Across the cliffs of death to drown
Dying souls dissolved in flesh
Rushing to be hurtled down
He guides them gently through a gate
On hinges fastened to the poles
Of birth and death—he will not stay
Or hurry his beloved souls
And there eternity is fixed
And all whom he will keep exist
Pavel Chichikov
July 2, 1994
LIKENESS
Spiteful creature cumbered with a soul
Clumsy carcass buried in a hole
Oculars that goggle in surprise
A tongue that gossips, innovates and lies
Hands that offer sacrifice or kill
A mind endowed with error and free will
Holes for hearing prophecy or slander
The skill to be a scholar or a pander
A body made of gelatin and mud
A spirit in rebellion ante-Flood
Immortal sick with charity and pride
Who let the blood and water from God’s side
And if it has no pity on his moans
At least it will forbear to break his bones
Pavel Chichikov
July 3–4, 1994
ABIGAIL’S MIRROR
A hall of mirrors, infinite regress,
Each imago to all the others less
Than fully living, fully fleshed
And each a priest to others, each confessed
All shriven in the sacrament of sight
A mutual confessional of light
For each compels the other to disclose
What lies behind what mirror image shows
Then coming round again presents a host,
A eucharistic solid, not a ghost
Pavel Chichikov
July 4, 1994
THE PLAY
A tiger has no verb to spring
But grips the sambar by the throat
Violets pray no quickening
But genuflect within the shoot
Being has no need to be
It is an utterance of hymns
That start with creeds of mystery
And end with amens of the limbs
Not fragile or commensurate
With death’s gratuitous designs
Being is inviolate
And breathlessly it speaks its lines
Pavel Chichikov
July 4, 1994
ONE PART HARMONY
Irate because I couldn’t hear
Forgetting I’d cut off my ear,
Angry that I couldn’t see
Although I’d plucked my eyes from me
I couldn’t touch or smell a rose
Because I had no hands or nose,
I hobbled stiffly down the street
Imprudent, I’d cut off my feet
But where had I obtained that knife
With which I had curtailed my life?
The answer wasn’t there to find
Stupid, I’d misplaced my mind
So pray to God who left us hearts
To give again the missing parts
Pavel Chichikov
July 5, 1994
ON THE WALL
Humble solar light that turns on walls
One side toward the day, the other toward nightfall
Chronometer projected from the sun
Noiseless, speechless, comforts everyone
Who watches measured hours of the light
Till time has stopped its counting of the night
Pavel Chichikov
July 5, 1994
THE DOVE
Green peppers in the summer garden swell
Look but do not sound like emerald bells
And butterflies, the kind called cabbage white
Resemble in their color winter light
Tomatoes carry parasols of shade
Hide coyly from the solar serenade
All similes that leave in minds a trace
Like flickers of emotion on a face
But what’s inside the simile is hidden
To farm the fertile soil of God forbidden
Doves of summer gardens that I know
Trees of winter gardens fixed in snow
Are metaphors in pentecostal words
That painters often show by painting birds
Pavel Chichikov
July 5, 1994
A YEAR
Three sparrows on a cherry tree
Weigh the springing branches down
Blossoms having dropped are free
Leaves begin their dying soon
The clouds of April multiply
And send the roots of rain below
Blossoms of the cherry tree
Against the season fall like snow
A cloud of August cumulates
And fattens with a sack of rain
The cherry recapitulates
Fruition of the year again
But when the cherry seems to die
The sparrows never wander far
The complement of birds is three
Underneath a winter star
Pavel Chichikov
July 6, 1994
THE PRESS
When dark-eyed night has proofed the text of stars
And turned the printed pages of the sky
She presses down the covers of the west
And blinks the velvet eyelid of her eye,
Descends the azure staircase from the dawn
The lamp of Venus held to light her way
And disappears below the rim of day—
On pages of the night the day is drawn;
But when the day has finished with his work
And set the printed ocean in its bed
He crumples up the colors he has made
And drops them in the sunset he has spread
And bears them on his shoulder to the night
Who uses them to give the stars their light
Pavel Chichikov
July 6, 1994
DAWN
Impetuous, devoted sun
Who braves the void of space to know
The company of spinning earth
And all that living on her go
How brave a lover to profess
Devotion with a ray of light
How faithful to remain with her
Until his love returns from night
Although the sun has risen once
He rises to his noon again
Intense, impassioned innocence
The children of the sun defends
And all the singing birds declare
A church that rises in the air
Pavel Chichikov
July 8, 1994
HERMITAGE
Sad ghost I saw in empty dreams confined
Who wandered through the galleries of the mind
Through endless rooms of sorrows unconfessed
Those furnished chambers stagnant and unblessed
You could not find a way to leave them by
Not even through the doorway of the eye
But then there came the footsteps of a guide
Although unseen approaching from outside
And with a breathing air the angel showed
Where moving like a river blessing flowed
Immense and brilliant, measureless and deep
That fills the channel of unending sleep
And carries off the palace of the will
If pride can fall, and sorrow can be still
Pavel Chichikov
July 8, 1994
EYES
When dusk pretends to fall for others it is dawn
Beetles exit trees, bats extend and yawn
Possums blink their eyes and paddle at the moon
Solemn is the bear, stentorian the loon
Mosquitoes hum and hunt for warm mammalian blood
Turtles haunt the stream, sifting through the mud
Nostrils open wide, wings of darkness spread
Eyes are in the moonlight, emerald and red
Pavel Chichikov
July 8, 1994
SURPRISE ENDING
I
Impressions please?
Blue ink in a glass of milky water
Sapphire dome with ivory precipitate
Clear lidless eye with brilliant dust in it
Magnetic spectrum of the visible
Withal it doesn’t shield us much
A gas and then, outside, the universe
A naked incantation of invisible design.
But really?
It is a demonstration of the mind
A dumb colossal show
And all the objects in it clowns,
The outer darkness filled with seats,
An audience invisible
That rustles like the northern lights.
Yet, who knows what is necessary
What could have been, or what is there?
Bow to the corners,
Bow to the eight winds
Fanfare of the Pleiades
Program of the seven sins
Horizon in the second row
Zenith on the high trapeze
On with the show—
The oceans break and sneeze
II
Over and over again we are his image
Mirror after mirror in regress
An image dim, receding into darkness
Not in form or stride resembling him
But in the lavish gift of will
Until with one long step we enter space
Break cleanly from the image
Take up our flesh and follow him
Pavel Chichikov
July 9–10, 1994
THE RIVER
Halfway to the shore of sleep
The barque of dreaming runs aground
And there I see the star-reflected
Rising of the sometime drowned
Faces turned above the water
Bumping gently at the shoal
As if the dead had risen swarming
Larval bodies of the soul
Have I fetched them from a thought
To see the dead with second sight
Or have they risen now from sleep
To breathe in me the summer night?
Pavel Chichikov
July 12, 1994
THE SHIELD
A shadow on the ground
Grows a mountain or a sea
A seedling in the ground
A nestling or a tree
But what becomes of us
When body as a shell
Gives spirit its release
Because it is immortal?
I see the spirit stand
Like vapor from the ocean
Above a desert land
A shadow its devotion
And there forever stays
To give the sunlight praise
Pavel Chichikov
July 13, 1994
STORM IN A CHURCH
What am I doing here, in this alien place of
Incrustating chapels? in the walls are dovecots
And the pigeon saints are cooing, strutting
Turning in their niches, bowing, praying
Whereas in heaven they have room to fly
Wheeling in flocks around the gold, all-seeing eye.
The church is like a roof indoors it lets
What cannot rain from clouds inside so wet
Communions and the wafer dry of crusts
Can mingle in the human mouths of priests
Or dash against the window pane of hell
Which is always someone’s inconvenient shell
I have no business here, the bats of wisdom
Flap around my head like vampires of the kingdom
But draw no ichor, blood or salt from me
I am the fruitless, bloodless tree
That wicked serpents rattle with their tails
When proving paradise is not a jail
Aislewards shuffles priest to light the candles
But nothing can illuminate these shambles
Stretching darkward toward the altar wall
Where everything collected from the Fall
Piles up against the upright of the cross,
So much accumulated from the good is lost
Angels, pigeons, penitents and doves
Of charity, the human congregation, move
And even serpent cherubim adjourn
Where flaming rubbish of unfinished business burns
And all the wrong decisions leave no trace
Not even ashes in that extramortal place
He lights the candles and goes home again
Not priest or saint or angel but a godsend
Who whispers from a place above the ark
But whom I cannot see because my face is dark
But someone in his clarity, unholy pain,
Sees me through lashings of immortal rain
Pavel Chichikov—July 14, 1994
THE VOICE
“You today and me tomorrow” the saying ran
In Kolyma’, Vorku’ta, Magadan’,
And ever since our banishment began
In Eden with a woman and a man
“Kick him down before the swine kicks you”
Has always been the human moral view
Except that something twists us in the head
Especially when we’ve been amply fed
That makes us stop with boot poised in the air
Or brandishing a crowbar or a chair
And says by way of providential warning
“Tomorrow you’ll regret it the savage morning”
Where does it come from, this quixotic voice
To those who didn’t know they had a choice?
Pavel Chichikov
July 16, 1994
THE SQUARE IN MOSCOW
Mechanical story of a winter clock, or a whisper
I saw the square of sorrows in the brazen gloom
The Polish horseman riding in the afternoon
In stationary madness on the pedestal of horror,
From which I turned away my head to see
All the homely barracks of the humble dead
Where curds of soil made stiff with blood were bed
Rain of black November was the cup of tea,
Passing out I saw my Russian friend
A shadow like a minute on a frozen clock
Turn within his coffin as a key secures a lock
Close the heavy door that passes to the end—
So I inside his memory defend the square
From armies of indifference—my eyes were there
Those who witness evil or the vagrant good
Should see as one who strangles on a cross of wood
Pavel Chichikov
July 16, 1994
HOME
Stretching with a silken claw
The bumblebee extends her straw,
A gleaming tube of ebony
Curves downward from the sucking bee,
She fills her gullet with the sweet
Nectar, and the slender feet
Palpate the waiting flower
Her eyes are goggles made to find,
Not signals of the soul and mind
All her memory and will
Detects the orchard on the hill,
The clover and golden hive
That keeps the race of bees alive—
So are we in our final hour
Pavel Chichikov
July 18, 1994
CONGREGATION
They are not men, thank God
But stolid trees, and sod
Not sin supports their roots
Supplies the greening of their shoots;
No mercy or compassion dies
In acid contact with their lies
Nor do they use abrasive law
To rub their neighbor’s branches raw,
Nor consciously obliterate
The saplings of another state—
They know the pity of the soil
That runs with sanctifying oil
Of God’s anointment of the just
Who pray not cruelty and lust
Pavel Chichikov
July 19, 1994
FLAME
Handsome as roses, high as a house
Knowing as Moses, meek as a mouse
A spirit of wisdom coming in flames
Blessing no kingdom, admitting no shame
Burns without burning, lights without heat
Moves without walking the length of a street
Gives to the merciful sense and content
All that is plentiful though it is spent
In glory it falls, in glory it goes
Darker than apathy, whiter than snows
Deeper than oceans. thin as a sail
Rarified starlight, solid and tall
Calm as tomorrow, stronger than wind
Drawn to the sorrow of those who have sinned
Pavel Chichikov
July 20, 1994
THE CAREER
The young man sees himself in heaven
Installed at some celestial bureau
Scanning documents and passports
Stamping visas, checking photos
Comparing faces with the past
To vet the value of the blessed
Long the road that goes from death
Brisk the wind along the bridge
All the crippled dying trudge
Face on against a gale of breath
So he thinks, to have the final say,
But someone else will read his dossier
Pavel Chichikov
July 20, 1994
LEAD YOU WHERE YOU DO NOT WANT TO GO
Never abandoned and never quick
He is a kind of hollow fool
Upended on a splintered stick
The plaything of the mindless cruel
They use him as the bane of crows
To scare them from the growing corn
And as he gazes down the rows
He wishes he was never born
But still this Peter of the grave
Ingenuous abandoner
Retains the potency to save
Through wonderful imprimatur
Although his eyes are made of seed
The scarecrow of the Lord can bleed
Pavel Chichikov
July 21, 1994
INTRUDER
The rain comes on in black array
All cape and cloak and stone the crows
It hangs like night above the day
And pelts the corn with smashing blows
But all at once it glides away
Like some intruder on his toes
It leaves a trail of glistening clay
And puddles in the garden rows
Pavel Chichikov
July 24, 1994
LADY
How does she earn her fair complexion
Yellow, white or black or rose?
Above her thorns she looks perfection
Takes a face from one of those;
Her mind is bent toward burgeoning,
Suns of April forcing May,
Then she comes in flowering,
Awards her pollen cheerfully;
A giver of the cheek of color
Shapely face and dark perfume
Her crisp and handsome paramour
May her bosom buzz and roam;
So generous a lady she
Who shows her shining face to me.
Pavel Chichikov
July 22, 1994
EVERYTHING WAITS
Everything waits, cicadas hum
The mockingbird sings: come, Lord, come
Sun is rising behind the clouds
Grey the morning, sky of shrouds
Tree of apples, tree of pears
Tree of mourning, the cross is there
Early still, the light comes on
The morning wakes up rows of corn
Glory morning, glory day
Who has brought my Lord away?
Sing the flying birds and then
Christ above, again, again
Pavel Chichikov
July 23, 1994
A PLANNED ECONOMY
Spider maid of many eyes
With which to see the foolish flies
Many strands of spider silk
With which to catch the victim-ninnies’ ilk
For me you also lie in wait
With beetle corpses as a bait
But when in fact you catch my face
In sticky ropes of spider lace
You run away in grief and rue
Because instead of me it’s you
That’s caught in a disastrous folly—
In place of meat there’s melancholy;
Those who set a spider-trap
May find a monster in their lap
Pavel Chichikov
July 25, 1994
COURT OF LAW
Another path, another way, all innocence and jaws
She climbs with lanky pedicles—the spider of the law;
Superb, immense to smaller things—rapid and assured
Her glands are set with medicine, her victims are immured
In cells of woven fabric whose bars come from her skin,
The sunlight cannot penetrate the prison wall within;
The sentence is imposed by her precisely to the letter
Instinctually punctual, she liquefies their matter
She drinks the potent liquor of the solitary worm
So eggs around her abdomen can maturate to term;
Her instinct is to death as blind as oculars can see,
She demonstrates the competence of dumb complexity,
And when the hatchlings liberate themselves from out of eggs
They launch themselves on mother silk and stretch their lawful legs
Pavel Chichikov
July 25, 1994
THE GLASS
The apples give up—
The tree is done,
Like green heads
Drops them one by one
With a sullen thud.
They roll, not far—
Where would they go
In a square back yard?
An ebb and flood
Of human heads
Falls from a tree,
Self-limited.
See forward then
To a time when trees
Bind with roots
Many of these,
And all the pins
The plates of glass
Lie buried deep
In the tall grass.
Pavel Chichikov
July 26, 1994
INVASION
Now in darkness flows the humid rain
Sounds of thunder, hollow and far off,
In corridors of cloud the pacing moon
Stumbles in a passion, far from earth
Trees grow hugely drooping, sag and fill
And shadows of a black tremendous day
Invade the homely spaces of the mind
And closely comes the presence of the sky
It comes and stands beneath the swelling trees
And furnishes the seething in my sight,
A never is but posturing might be
Inhabitant of never ending night
Pavel Chichikov
July 27, 1994
THE ORPHANAGE
A whisper far away
Not rain or lightning hiss
Or even sweepwind clouds
Scrape and billow of the atmosphere
And the sun that desiccates all things
You will not find it
As a calf finds a meadow of sweet grass
And a bull the white horn of the cow
And a suckling lamb the ewe’s teat
All in a fine, rich meadow
It resonates
You will not hear it move
It has no mass or poise
Or drift of weight on water
No ship or sacrificial man
No love or recompense
Or sacrifice or incense of the mind
Or pendant sorrow
Or black silver of harmony
Or innocent estrangement
He gave it when he set the garden
Between the rivers
And felt the pulse of living mud
And shocked the stony heart and said:
Go where you will, steal or stay
And it rose
It looked around
It said but where?
To the vacant gaze of the river,
Do not make me free, it said, in terror
Gone away, gone away
Where have you gone to leave me here?
Four paths and more to the white meadow
And the fire seething, ashes and coals
And nothing of the God that made me
Pavel Chichikov—July 30, 1994
A NARROW TRAIL
A campfire of butterfly weed
Burns brightly in daylight now
And the sun is also a campfire,
But soon the first white frost
Will dampen these.
Travelers
Fold their packs
And scattered
Ashes smolder and go out.
The weaver spins a web
Of flour and rime
With her fine legs;
Her beads of glassine water
Make the stars;
All shimmer and break
In the white morning;
Duration soaks with rain
And the path
Through plantains drenched by dew and fire
Is the journey of a morning.
Pavel Chichikov
August 1, 1994
THE DROWNED
Was He really one of us?
Cowardly, untruthful,
Quick to take, not give
Later to be rueful;
Or are we more like Him,
So knowing yet deceiving
Our lonely souls within
Unlistened to and grieving?
He sees to Whom we pray—
Our Peter who is me—
But takes his eyes away
Sinks into a sea—
Beneath a wave I found
The grieving soul I drowned.
Pavel Chichikov
August 3, 1994
THE WORM
Excuse me little tube of flesh
You rubber vessel filled with earth,
The sun that warms and gives me birth
For you is desiccating death;
The edges of the spade that fix
The furrow of the pungent rue
Unkindly sever all the slack
And boneless bristling form of you;
But when my final seed of breath
Is buried in another hole
The spade of God will cleave in two
My body blind and wriggling soul;
And both together join again
When He shall come and kindly mend.
Pavel Chichikov
August 8, 1994
THE HEALING
Time is a short sword,
Does not cut deeply
But sharp, my Lord,
You painful wield it
And my soul remove
With one swift blow
So that your mercy proves
What mercy does not know.
I would have never known
Though filled with such
A splendid grace
How empty was my pain
Unless with time you touched
And cauterized the wounded place.
Pavel Chichikov
August 12, 1994
THE CELL
What do I see of them?
Two beads for eyes
And wings like cuticles of air
So beating quick and rare
And legs that pick and prise
The pollen from the stamen.
A waist in armor
Slim and strong
The stomach striped with fur
A dripping tongue
To catch the nectar.
But when inside the cell
Hexagonal and truly hidden
From all that I know well
What secret then to me forbidden
Where insects dwell?
There live the workers and the queen
And mysteries I have not seen.
Pavel Chichikov
August 12, 1994
ABSOLUTION
Sweet soul that I had lost entire,
Who has confessed his life confesses all,
And though it burns post-mortum in desire
Inflamed with love of You it wills
Itself so living, death no longer kills
But grows to quickened life by fire
Past death I see in heaven rising, bright
And calm invariable suns,
Those apertures of death’s immortal fate,
And there pass through the forms of holy ones
Who once were burning in their bones
But now inflamed with love are light
You will compel away by fire’s pain
The flesh of death so flesh can live again
Pavel Chichikov
August 13, 1994
JIGSAW
What puzzle’s this?
Bird in nest?
Place it there
Sort the rest—
Jumbled stars
Eyes of grace,
Sisters seven
Roll in place,
Red the robin’s
Curving breast,
White the water
Crystal’s nest,
Blue the oceans
Trees are green
Beaks of eagles
Pick and preen,
Thunder rolling
Clouds descend,
Who is left
When puzzles end?
Who is this
To melt the rocks,
Replace the pieces
In their box?
Pavel Chichikov
August 14, 1994
QUICKLY NOW...
Quickly now, before it goes
On some unfearful trip to death
The dragonfly in shining clothes
Wriggles from a single sheath
Then in armor, rudder out
Slues and wheels among the reeds
Until above the feeding trout
Feeds the life on which it feeds
Pavel Chichikov
August 16, 1994
CHANCE
It is of course a random meeting
Stained-glass wings, a midnight keel
Embroidered for an angel’s wedding
Nicotiana’s nightingale;
Sing in color, not in voices
Hymn and flutter all in one
Praise of Mary has its choices
Morning psalter, midnight calm;
All of God’s anointed lovers
Crown of roses, beads of dew,
Butterfly, a halo, hovers
Around the head of feverfew;
Church of angels, beasts and flowers
Bread of nectar, wine of rain
Take communion from the showers
Randomly again, again
Pavel Chichikov
August 20, 1994
THE PRICE
Then we come forward joyfully
But now in pain,
As then he reigns
But now in dreadful agony
Hangs on the tree.
No way forward to him
Except in sorrow,
To be forsaken now
Is then to somehow win
Release from painful sin.
In your bright grave
Where once your birth
Had verified our worth,
Now you wait to live,
By dying life to save.
Once more then confirm:
This offering of peace
May flesh release,
No pang will burn
If suffering earn.
Take the place
Of all who grieve
And painfully receive
The pang whose grace
Is soon to see your face.
Pavel Chichikov
August 22, 1994
JUMP
Jump toward the nearest star—
How much closer are you?
Live a hundred years—
How much forever is it?
In everything I’m small—
My length of life is smallest—
Greater than worlds is He
And yet my God sees me
Pavel Chichikov
August 23, 1994
WHERE
In heaven now and you do not know it?
The Lord showed me His fog
Damp, rich and still
Glistening in the trees
Their boles and branches
And on the grass and ivy—
Do You not please
The chorus of angels
Which are cicadas
Pavel Chichikov
August 26, 1994
SWOOP
Like old men monsters hung from wing to wing
Their snouts with bulbous mushrooms burgeoning
These chimeras of mouse and monster rest,
Sleeping in the hollow of a tree.
Then an evening purple sets them free
To gobble flickering fauna of the sky
While flights of arthropods go winging by.
Nothing but an ear can follow close
The echo of a swift mosquito ghost
So many worlds of senses never sensed
Are all the worlds from which we are dispensed,
Nothing know, impeccable in flight,
Of nightmare-muzzled hunting in the night.
Pavel Chichikov
August 26, 1994
SIGNS
For W.P.
As junebugs beat against the screen
The worlds against my ego beat
If one of them an entry gains
And clatters dying at my feet
It will rise up and fly again
Though worlds in darkness not be seen;
Though images in mirrors break
The Lord of worlds will not forsake,
If men be dogs, dogs are not men,
And truth is not comparison.
Pavel Chichikov
August 27, 1994
THE PANG
Astonishing, that through my pain I find You
Through pain You won my grace
For though You could have chosen bliss
No other bliss but Yours to take my place
And yet not bliss, but savage pain
And that to feel so others of us gain.
Where dowries of Your sacrifice are paid
The cancer of the flesh or triple grief
Of those Golgotha criminals betrayed
A rebel god, a rebel and a thief
There sit you too my Master and my slave
To follow You I must betroth my grave.
Then fortunate to feel what You have felt
Still then my failing heart must beg Your help.
Pavel Chichikov
August 29, 1994
ANCIENT
Dragonfly, before the coal,
Abdomen a keel of fire
Wings like resonating wire
Falcon swift
But long ago,
Now through Cenozoic light
I see you softly
Touch the marigold
You Carboniferous desire
Of the infinitely old.
Pavel Chichikov
August 31, 1994
FAITHFUL
Speckled worm that clasps our crop
Of well-grown August carrot tops,
Bands of green, an emerald color
Egg-yolk flecks, black annulars,
Tapering tail and bulbous head
Moved by inching minipeds,
Eating, growing toward cocoon
A swallowtail by next full moon,
Your brainless head has more of sense
Than scientific innocence,
Not once resourcefully denies
Your destiny as butterfly.
Pavel Chichikov
September 2, 1994
JUMP
Like tarnished bronze, a brazen toy
Grasshopper caught, a fall alloy
Of summer sun and summer leaves
In breastplate armor, narrow greaves
Sharp claws that prick the human skin
Of palms that hold the hopper in,
Leaded turrets of its eyes
Without expression or surprise
Calculate the jump away,
Instinctively alive, not prey,
Exquisite manikin, machine
Of art most elegant and clean
No artifice of brain made you:
A cold September proves it true.
Pavel Chichikov
September 3, 1994
CALENDAR
Helianthus in September
Spindle neck and heavy head
Slumps and sleeps, old pensioner,
Last survivor of the bed;
Birds, the juveniles of August
In mufti now, not fully fledged,
Gamblers handicapping autumn
Bets of August laid unhedged;
Balsam flowers, scarlet pokers
Hide their seeds in springy traps,
Clench posterity like jokers
Spray it in the beetles’ laps;
Wasps in shade-and-sunlight dapples
Excavating mines in apples,
Anthropoids, as we are them,
All are living, all pro tem.
Pavel Chichikov
September 6, 1994
THE CHAPEL
Little dogwood, turning scarlet
Out of all the leaves are six
Blushing in the death of autumn,
Pallid green and scarlet mix.
Only yesterday in April
Ivory blossoms floated there
Now the commons of September
Sing the chapel of your hair.
January bending double
Fell in heaviness of snow,
Come another April upright,
Tell the little dogwood: Grow!
Pavel Chichikov
September 8, 1994
THE TRIAL
A noon of stars would give much light
But not as great a noon as one
That shining, shadows overbright
A midnight of a million suns;
So here with self-regard impeached
A human wisdom may contrive
To see by sun it cannot reach
And reaching death remain alive;
For all who go by light of day
No starlight need to see their way.
Pavel Chichikov
September 9, 1994
THE MAKER
Specks of dust no one can sweep
In jungles of the grass and tree,
Chips of coal with legs that leap
Beneath the clover’s canopy,
Yet magnified with peering glass
A transformation comes to pass:
Astonishing complexity
Attends a perfect symmetry.
And if I magnify again
The chaos of the leaping throng
Each in life, unlawful then,
Becomes a pattern of its own
Now leaping on its errands free,
Dissolved in perfect mystery
Of chaos, with a greater sense
Determined by its innocence.
And if He comes to sweep them up
Then who am I to drink His cup?
Pavel Chichikov
September 9, 1994
MELISSA
No sport there is for butterflies to kiss
When spending in the hedge a loving hour,
No meeting of the birds is called a tryst
Except in human fanciful desire,
For all is purposeful, devoid of charm
Or sentimental, ministers a harm
To every government of nature’s fire.
And yet poor anthropos has less of this
Unconscious beauty of the beastly bower
Though all his poetry and song insist,
Devolving from the symmetry of flowers,
And who knows how the buzzing of the swarm
Encourages melissa to conform
To all her queenly instincts and desires?
Pavel Chichikov
September 10, 1994
AWAKE
Awake, the garden yawns, grows bright
Her eyes fold back the lids of night
And with a languid stir at seven
She stretches arms of trees to heaven
The insects of the darkness hush
And put away the drum and brush
While birds unlimber silver cases
Where voices kept in velvet places
Symphonize discordant breath
And all together conquer death
My lady garden, gracious form,
Arises as the sun grows warm
She stands in brightness in her place
A green astonishment of grace
Pavel Chichikov
September 11, 1994
FAIR WARNING
A boatman rows while lying on his back
His eyes in compound facets squinting
At larvae of mosquitoes and the green
Integuments of turtles in the cracks;
Fair silver bubbles cluster at his sides
Buoy up vibrissae on his oars,
His abdomen of silver represents
A camouflaged surrender to the skies;
All he sees is gathering below:
A turtle rising upward and a show
Of mandibles’ converging undertow—
Everything commands the boatman: Row!
Pavel Chichikov
September 12, 1994
THE RING
See the way the shadows run
A crossword puzzle of the sun
The shorter words are under trees
The greater space has none of these
Long periods stretch out through time
Till breathless day and sunset rhyme
While underneath a bush of roses
Beetles learn what public prose is:
Sun sing out a chant of words
Until the service of the birds,
Moon a darker hymn and air,
A common book of silver prayer.
Pavel Chichikov
September 13, 1994
THE PESTLE
Segmented worm, your wings transparent ice,
Black abdomen and ebony device
Of jointed tongue and sipping straw in flight,
Pollen-yellowed, eyes a global night,
Voice of iron, spiracles of brass,
Durable as leather, hard as glass,
Light as sunshine, forthright as the wind
Hovering, alighting and again
Desiring although without a heart
Until repletion sweetly fills each part,
Miner of the pistil, flower’s friend,
A bumblebee—September—summer’s end:
Frantic rushing agitates the trees
But mindless, solemn, futureless the bees.
Pavel Chichikov
September 14, 1994
IN THE MOUNTAINS
A garden stood between two rivers
One flowed backward into time
One flowed onward out of time
But nothing in the garden moved
Away from sweet divinity,
Forever played in simple light
Above profusions of eternity;
But you remember, as I do
It was a place that never slept
As infants never sleep,
As we the comatose who watch them
Dream we are awake
But underneath a ruined trouble
Arch our backs until we break;
No option then, we backward run
To find the source and then go on.
Pavel Chichikov
September 15, 1994
THE MOLE
Mining time with pick and shovel
Crush the hours, scoop the minutes
Heave them backward from the rubble
Shards of diamond-pointed wreckage
Shatter, glitter in the passage
Clear the road to end of trouble
No intention livens me
So I clear away debris
Minor measurement is reckoned
Nothing presses, nothing beckons
No way out except to be
Knowing not the soul, does he
Pavel Chichikov
September 17, 1994
RISING
Ascending from the blind fields undersea
Those streamlined tesserae of brilliant light
Moon-sided dolphins yellow as the sun
Grey, red and cobalt as the morning, true
But cold, upwelling from uncolored night
And heavy twilight of uncertain hue,
Emerging, turn their scales to God's desire
Surrender as they kindle their cold fire,
Feed and then extinguish as they drift below;
So we too, dull as any cold abyss
Will rise to blessed fire as we rise to bliss
And all we souls enflamed and fed on peace
Will shine but never sink from our release
So giving light as sunrise to the Shining One.
Pavel Chichikov
September 17, 1994
RISING (version 2)
Ascending from the blind fields undersea
Those streamlined tesserae of brilliant light
Moon-sided dolphins yellow as the sun
Grey, red and cobalt as the morning, true
But cold, up welling from uncolored night
Heavy twilight of uncertain hue,
Emerging, turning scales to God’s desire
Surrender as they kindle fire,
Feed, extinguish as they drift below;
So we too, dull as ocean’s cold abyss
Will rise to fire as we rise to bliss
Souls enflamed and fed on peace
Will shine but never sink from our release
Giving light as sunrise to the Shining One.
Pavel Chichikov
September 17, 1994
THE INDICTED
Annoyance crouches, cuts me through,
A bulb of crocus split and chewed
Buried once is now on top
Of late September’s flower crop;
Those businessmen the squirrels pass
The test of profit in the grass
Though they fornicate and climb
They cannot fall, commit a crime
Come to justice for transgression,
No court for squirrels sits in session;
We in summons called shall rise
When justice holds the last assize,
We the charged stand up and wait
In hope He will exonerate.
Pavel Chichikov
September 19, 1994
NOTHING YET
The white breeze of autumn, savorless and clear, moves in the garden,
Impudent, the black bird struts from hedge to edge to the apple tree
Nodding a hard and brilliant eye at me, but nothing sees, struts back;
The crickets frontward surge and sing three silver notes
Leaning toward the chilly night and the coming autumn frosts.
Well knit, like a weaver comes the season’s end and all the busy shuttles
Weave and die, weave and finish off a brilliant garment.
And we will put it on.
The black bird knows, he isn’t long impressed, so to the hedge he goes,
Prepares in earth a robe for another guest.
My Lord and Master, help me slip it on—the sun has touched the west.
Pavel Chichikov
September 20, 1994
SEEDBED
Moonflower, pale guest of autumn
To the white and blinding moon
You are the afterimage
Faint, and sweetly scented
And as the moths
To your unfolding go
So too the stars
To which the darkness is an afterglow
Attend the infant moon
And pollinate with light
The dark unliving flower
Pavel Chichikov
September 20, 1994
MASS
Hosta, flower, host of bells
Invisibly you raise unsinned
A silent blood and sanctify
With invocations of the wind
Bell and flower, lavender
Purple trumpets royal and frail,
Unsounding yet embellishing
The sacrificial summer grail
Bees and pollen, straw of life
A noise of psalters left unsaid,
A virgin’s praise and messengers,
Epiphanies to raise the dead
Pavel Chichikov
September 22, 1994
BIOTA
Unaware yet disciplined
The winds rush south, chaotic and in form
Black winged and strong but tenuous
Beneath the milkwhite belly of the greater storm,
Embodied in its vapor, massive
As a body in the sea
The front lifts up its flukes and surges
Southward leaving flotsam of the broken trees.
Pavel Chichikov
September 23, 1994
WHO COMES ABROAD?
Light rising weightlessly
Pearl dawn a risen red,
Departed are the strung and glutinous webs.
All sleep the mantids in the bitter leaves
And larvae swell with cold
That will as butterflies
As black and yellow swans
Spring dawnward in the year.
Birds in bushes
Tucked against the cold
In beds of feathers
Sleep or whisper
Of the melodies complacent in the egg.
White breath from all arising
Animals breathes dawn in spurts
Of fragrant clouds
Drifts as muffled choir
To the equinox.
Backward paces dawn
Across the world
And who will come with me
When morning sleeps
And hears how silent are the trees?
Pavel Chichikov
September 24, 1994
THE LESSON
Flushed from berry bushes the frightened grey toad said:
“I’ll prove your real existence now before you strike me dead:
Omnipotent and wise, my lord, you scarify the ground
Flush the sluggish earthworms up, the loaded springtails down.
Beetles, caterpillars, slugs and other tasty vermin,
Feed and reproduce to fit the schedule you determine.
I have adored you from afar although without display,
And if you let me go I’ll, pious, quickly hop away.
All of life and death is yours, how might it not it be so?
Who else would cover up myself with all-concealing snow?
When we need a crawl of worms for fattening the brood
You bring a blackened thunder cloud and soon we have our food.”
I covered up the toad again, that slimy catechumen,
With piety so logical she sounded almost human.
Pavel Chichikov
September 26, 1994
IN REFUGE
Above the storm a clear, bright light is burning
And over that inhuman stars are rumbling
Heavy as they turn and turn on iron spindles
Not passionate, or angels in disguise
But sagging places where the world is heavy
Breathes, throws off its lethargy and burns,
And we are this, God’s dross.
Besides, in some inhuman mood
He grows in humus of a sun the soul,
Dross and fire grows toward Him and utters words,
Grotesque, and humus falls away in speckled folds
Leaving fire to rejoin another flesh.
I cannot say how strange, for being strange
I am another and will see the change.
Pavel Chichikov
September 26, 1994
HERALD
Last night, and this not myth but simple truth,
We stood together just above the deeply breathing garden
Watching flashes bolt between the clouds
In ladders, swords and nets, in revelations.
And then, one flash that overfilled the sky
And purged, for seconds, both of us, our humbled retinae.
How small, how overwhelmed we are, and this not He
Who passed above us and our apple tree
But running slave who in the showing of her fire
Spreads abroad her lord compassion’s hire.
She is an omen—other to come soon
As sun to us the brilliance of a noon.
Pavel Chichikov
September 27, 1994
FOR THE DROWNED
I saw a yellow barge-horse pull
A string of barges, white-cloud full
Fleets of sunshine heading south
The gleam of winter in its mouth
Tarps of azure bent around
A cargo of the summer-drowned
All the terns and blackwing gulls
Were keeping convoy round the hulls
Pavel Chichikov
September 29, 1994
LAST DAY
Chilled the garden’s last day of September
Bows and paces backward from the spring
Yellow in the air are bits of pollen
Rowing in the dusk with tiny wings
Black and yellow caterpillars fatten
Steadily in foraging on rue
Swaddled in their self-imagined cotton
Soon they’ll sleep the coming winter through
Now my ghost is wandering in sleep
Along a road that glimmers in the dark
It sweeps the frost and scuffles with its feet
The stiffened grass that’s finished with its work
And there my trail is printed in the rime
As loyal as death, as innocent as time
Pavel Chichikov
September 30, 1994
THERE A WOMAN...
There a woman pierced with grief
Stands beneath a slaughtered thief
And if the world will not confess
The mother of a man’s distress
And if the lancing of his side
Will not a sacrament confide
Though sorrowing she stands alone
When Roman soldiers break his bones
And no one mystifies her loss
Or takes the body from the cross
Acknowledges the sterile tomb
As fertile as a second womb
Still equal is in bitter grief
The mother of a slaughtered thief
Pavel Chichikov
October 1, 1994
THE MASK
Sad, depleted, we the ghosts—the filthy ones
Our skin is moist and white as molted leather
All the putrid moltings are the sons
All the inner leavings are the daughters;
At night I dragged behind me in a trace
A pumice ball of porous stone
This indifferent trophy was my face
Sin and semblance of the inner bone;
Rotting from place, we cannot place
The weakness of the back, the blood that gleams—
This tottering cadaver can’t be us
Disintegrating faces must be dreams.
Pavel Chichikov
October 2, 1994
BETHLEHEM
Defenseless bodies bleached by darkness,
Feeble white and helpless slaves
That masticate the roots of trees
To feed their writhing worms in caves
Their cleverness is not aware
Their spittle takes the place of steel
But nothing needful is disgraced
And nothing has the need to feel
Like these we will become a race
That builds the city of the dead
One tower in eternity
One house of pre-digested bread
Pavel Chichikov
October 4, 1994
GODCHILD
For A.B.H.
Where she came from that I know
Far beyond the winter snow
Deeper than the roots of trees
Higher than the Pleiades
Long before the birth of stars
Transcending all parameters
A child whose birth is in October
Flying, an immortal plover,
Migrating from where I know
Far beyond the winter snow
Tonight beneath my sleeper’s cope
Descending on a downward slope
I’ll see the valley of my birth
The lights of upward-seeking earth
And then to where she comes from go
When upward falls another snow
Pavel Chichikov
October 4, 1994
GEESE
Night of a tired new moon
Except for the eye of the bear
Battered old wing of a crow
Aldeberan caught in his hair
Bear with a lurch and a cough
Touching the eaves of the house
Dogs of the hunter aloft
Silent the step of the mouse
Trios of crickets and four
Once there were thousands of strings
Now the divisible choir
Tunes in the holly and sings
And all of the geese on the lake
Neck to the south as they wake
Pavel Chichikov
October 6, 1994
NIGHT
All will be well
But all may not be well with us,
If seeds are blanks who’ll fire spring
If God’s a guess
Who’ll forfeit everything?
See how (so thin a moving veil)
Our hollow ball of gas unseen
Between unfeeling space and frail
Compassion intervenes.
Remove the hand
Whose fingers are the lens
Of ancient space and clutching
Who will find his mirror in a face
Or love an infinite indifferent grace?
Pavel Chichikov
October 8, 1994
THE COURT
The sky was filled with lilac-grey
Unearthly color sped the day
And all was peace and massive splendor
Sunless yet, composed and tender,
Waiting, but it grew I thought
Toward something that arrives unsought
Not mystery so much or light:
A vast indifferent plebiscite
Of all that lives, of all that dies
Unsouled, insensate in our eyes
Its own, not ours, that holds a court
To judge a long forgiven tort
Forgiven once but still to blame:
A silence comes and calls our name
Pavel Chichikov
October 9, 1994
A PLAY
A sea of molten gold—bright wave,
A foam electrum breaking on the crests,
Yellow running deeps as dense and brave
As reaches of a globe of roaring wests;
Oceans metallic, sprays of silver foam
All flung in air, a filigree that roars
And thunders shining metal home
In silver droplets, liquefied and hoar;
Words heavy, shifting, intricately made
As if a sculptor cast the waves entire,
And these to run a massive promenade
Above the gold abysses of desire;
All this in Cleopatra, Antony,
But where had Shakespeare found this memory?
Pavel Chichikov
October 11, 1994
VALLEY OF THE YALAKOM
Between two mountains a snowy cliff,
Raven came, pin feathers stiff,
The head an arrow, and a drift
Of blackness followed, hushed and deaf;
From left to right above the Y
Where clefted rivers joined and ran
A freezing channel of the sun
Cast my shadow on the sky;
Fortunate the morning then
To see the bird’s infinity,
Me the raven passing by,
You would not see me pass again.
Pavel Chichikov
October 14, 1994
PRAYER OF GARDENS
Chrysanthemum and dahlia the chrysalis defend
Beside the root the caterpillar spins and has an end
Then every form disintegrates and dies until the sun
Like grace of God unperishing has touched the buried one
The Resurrection comes before prefigured by the world
As butterflies engorge with blood transparent wings unfurled
A resonance, impermanence that echoes and transcends
The chrysalis, the dahlia, chrysanthemums—amen.
Pavel Chichikov
October 15, 1994
ANGELS
All in the light I saw a greening meadow soft and pure
Beside a world degenerate, corrupted and unsure,
Four ranks of trees grew crosslike toward an altar on a motte
Where stood in white serenity a lamb without a blot,
The breast was pierced and from the wound there leaped a crimson spring
Of blood that fell unceasingly, a cord of red unfailing—
Below the wound a calyx stood, to catch the life of Him,
Despite the running of the blood it never flowed the rim,
There beside the altar knelt the angels of the wing,
Displayed the torment, spike and crown, but never ceased to sing,
Also at the altar knelt, ciborium in chain
Two angels of the shining face, the smoke as rising rain,
Each the glory of the lamb composed itself in them
The raising of their voices in the choir of the hymn—
All glory be, all honor to our sacrificing Life,
Lamb that in His passion freely offers to the knife,
To Him belongs the meadow where all other lambs may graze,
Hosannah in the highest—sing obedience and praise.
Pavel Chichikov
October 17, 1994
THE FLOOD
Around the shoulders of a leaper
The crimson mantle of a creeper
One was rising up a tree
But now in Fall a flaming ruby;
Setting flowers, dogwood holds
Abeyance till the black unfolds
And all the patient dying now
Mounts up as much as will allow
The future of the risen sun
When up from darkness it’s begun;
But now I hear the winter coming
Thundering where frost is running
High along the winter wall
Of stony skies, forgotten Fall.
Pavel Chichikov
October 16, 1994
GOLGOTHA
A cloud the color of a cat
Smoke grey and yet a yellow eye
Does not so much as blink,
No lightning through the corpus pries
No tails of wind outlash a flank
Of stuttering trees
But still above the calm decides,
Crouching as a storm of prey,
A predator that nothing hides
Whose ambush is the living day,
Breath from breath divides
That takes His breath away
How nearly done the killing is
Sweat and shallow breathing show,
Holding for the squalid peace of His
Disgraced, abandoned letting go
Those whose station is below
Will take His cloak as prize
I see a fitful breezlet bend
The feather of a single leaf,
The heavy darkness bears no wind
Or stops the groaning of the thief—
Come die my God so we may live,
So long your dying,
And we have sinned.
Pavel Chichikov
October 19, 1994
THE LESSON
Taurus burned Aldeberan
Orion struck his foot aflame
His Rigel set a burning pace
Friction fired Charles’s Wain
And all the stars emitted smoke—
The black of space—and then they broke
Like covied geese that fly to ground,
Away to westward, out and down.
Light comes up, who would not burn
Like stars and leaves—October learn.
Pavel Chichikov
October 22, 1994
CANDLES
Said rising sun to dying tree:
“Draw up your liquor, grow with me,
The hearts of leaves unfold and swell
To feed on light, grow green and full.”
“I will not grow,” said tree to sun,
“The frost has come, I am undone,
So as you rise my life must fall,
And ice and snow must be my pall.”
“Then crimson, ochre, yet some green,
Ignite ascendings of my beams,
And like the candles of my Lord
They’ll sacrifice to light His word.”
Answering, but not the star,
The maple rose in morning prayer,
“I will obey,” said tree to Him,
And held to light a shining limb.
Pavel Chichikov
October 24, 1994
MIGRATION
Sideways slanting in the sun,
Caught as if on edge, a world,
Steel and silver spider’s thread
From here to heaven comes unfurled
And drifts, once flashing, then unseen
With spiderbrood like pith on end
The floating hunters of the green.
The lines from here to heaven drift
With spiders of a finer silk
Than could be seen except for light
Illuminating spider’s milk.
And what may else inhabit light
If light to us is dark as night?
Pavel Chichikov
October 25, 1994
THE GAME
Four nights ago as full as brass
The moon retired to the south,
Now darker grow the nights as she
Distends the blackness of her mouth;
Shadows fill her lighted caves
As floods of sunlight ebb away,
All memories forget the day
Submerged in black nocturnal waves;
Though nothing vital can be seen, a hatch
Of sightless egglings drums the shell
Of celebrating seamless dark—
The moon swings like a spotted bell
And then complacent, long she rings
To baptize black and sightless things:
If then I see not by Your grace
What blind intention moves its place?
Pavel Chichikov
October 26, 1994
THE FIRST JUDGMENT
A mockingbird in white-barred wings,
A mouse-grey suit, black beads for eyes,
Perching, puffing from the cold
Cocks a smooth head and struts nearby:
“An invitation came today
High and low to birds in trees
Extended from the One who sings
With mockingbirds and chickadees—
And you come also, seat yourself
Astride the hollow of my neck,
I’ll take you to a sitting of
The Court of Beasts to hear Him speak.”
Growing smaller by the flash of
White-barred wings I climb astride,
Snapping night-black mandibles
And leaping up, it flies, I ride.
Up it goes although a Mocking
Bird should never fly so far,
Colder, deeper grows the blue
Until I see a daylight star—
And still we climb, the sky is black,
The sun refulgent in the west,
How much higher will we fly?
Icy crystals ring its breast
The snap of wings is sharp and thin
When most of air is left behind,
Mockingbird’s trajectory
Attains a height and then declines—
We slow and fall, the Earth comes up
As rapidly as silver rain
Comes down in summer thunderstorms—
Soon we’re flying over plains
And valleys, rolling countryside,
And there ahead I see a copse
And all the species coming toward it,
Emus, snakes and antelopes,
Crowds of creatures, mooing, pawing,
Crawling, buzzing, fast and slow,
Buzzards hopping, lizards leaping
Camels bleating as they go—
Monkeys swinging, running upright,
Hippos trailing steaming weeds,
Invertebrates and vertebrates,
Tarantulas and centipedes—
Down the mockingbird, descending,
Gliding forward toward the trees
Lower makes it all the faster
Whipping branches flog my knees—
And then at once, without a warning
Pitching up and with a squawk
The mockingbird presents its wings—
No better lands the perching hawk.
A hush of adoration spread
Although I could not see the whole
Of this immense and spreading grove,
Filled with beasts, from bird to mole.
An everbrilliant presence grew,
Not ominous or bleakly strong,
It was as if a loving sun
Had come on earth to warm this throng.
Then all at once I heard a voice
That seemed to grow within our souls
And yet with all-consuming joy
Spoke from trees—leaf, crown and bole:
“Come forward creatures, every kind,
Creeping, running, swimming, flying,
All My graceful, handsome ones,
Now show how beauty is undying.”
Up they rose, or crawled, or leapt
Displaying, preening, giving call,
Galloped, whinnied, caracoled,
Coiled and brachiated, bawled.
We saw the judgment growing bright
As if each leaf compelled the sun,
Uncurling in the fond delight
Of shining for the Splendid One:
“The swift composure of the wolf
The stilting of the meek gazelle
The clamber of the climbing goat
All pleasure Me and serve Me well—
Stealth of leopard, bulk of whale
Who slips through seas despite her mass,
Yet beautiful are ants and beetles,
Mantises that haunt the grass—
Rotifers in drops of water
Squid in oceans, quail in brakes
Camels in the sands of deserts
Birds that wade in brackish lakes,
All come forward, how I love you,
Pattern that I made before
The stars quiescent, stars resplendent,
Birds in eggs and birds that soar.”
And as they came it grew so bright
Though yet as calm and cool as trust
That all embellished in the brilliance
Seemed as angels of the dust—
Though we were on earth the rivers
Flowed above our bowing heads,
Awe the sacrament resounded,
Sky above the ocean beds—
But then the mockingbird grew restless,
Scratched its poll and stretched its wings
Darker grew the teeming forest—
“Come, I’ll show you other things.”
Then upward flew the mockingbird
Above the branches of the trees
And ever upward till the sky
Was bright above its cloudy lees
It soared as high as eagles do
This little bird of grey and black
And I as small as any finch
Gripped the rounding of its back
Saw the rolling of the earth
And as we flew I looked around—
There was night from east to west
There the flowing of the dawn—
“Now I see the future come,”
Explained the mockingbird to me,
“Here I know how love is knit
As there we knew it from the tree.”
But as we rose the sun held back
The crimson line between the earth
And sky remained a narrow crack,
Announced the day but not its birth,
“O Lord,” I prayed, “do not delay
But show us what You mean for us.”
I heard a breath of wind give voice:
“Not My intention, but your choice.”
So then the white-barred bird leapt higher,
The light of day came with a rush
Beneath us stretched a flashing sea
Of blue-white combers—powerfully
They fell upon a sterile shore
And snapping ate and crumbled more—
Beyond the coastline rose a land
Eroded by a sea of sand
Though here and there were cities buried
Domed with armor, silent, worried—
The air grew colder as we flew
The silent domes transparent grew
Inside were people, men and women
Some alive and some were ridden
By an elder force of passion
As if an outer soul were fastened
Fast to soul that lived within—
It fed on blank unconscious sin
And rode that soul and forced its breath
Though this could only give it death—
I knew at once the domes were tombs
The living-chambers dying rooms,
Then frightened, dizzy with the height
I prayed to God “Give back the night,
I am not strong enough to see
Eternal tombs of misery,
Revive us with Your simple love
Return us to the brilliant grove.”
I was again on Earth, at night,
The mockingbird had taken flight.
Pavel Chichikov
October 30, 1994
SLEEP
The earth is brown with lassitude
And a rogue sleep descends in shrouds of fog—
The sky has come to fill the hollows
And the earth holds out her arms to the white sleeves,
A gown of white, diaphanous and fragile.
As daylight comes she wanders, dressed,
But soon prepares for dying
In the white robe. Lies down
And falls beneath the brazen leaves.
The oaks cover her as she turns
And dreams of crocus with yellow stamens.
But now dark sleep,
And the mirror of the sky receives her breath
To show she lives.
Pavel Chichikov
November 1, 1994
THE TOMB
Where do the toads go when the summer’s gone?
Down among the granules of the earth’s brown bone—
Scooping with her front pads, kicking with the rear
Spraying out the soil on the spoor of the deer
Darkness and silence the old toad’s tune
Sung below a whisper by the dark of the moon.
Now within her chamber, wheezing in her sleep,
All around the earthworms rustle as they creep
Nothing in her dreaming travels very fast
Winter’s in the future, summer’s in the past—
Buried in confinement, breathing through her skin,
Nothing can find her that walks through the wind.
Pavel Chichikov
November 2, 1994
DOXOLOGY
Not friendly twinkling stars, but fierce fires
Burning through parsecs but not emptiness,
His bending, twisting forces of the vacuum
Betray the grip and fingers of the infinite—
But then His rule, a mind that has no bound,
Compelling will, and love that crushes space
Forms and reforms what is and what has been
And what will be, all one together being charity—
This is the least of God’s ferocity,
For dying visible: the tiger stars
Are all together less than seizing grace:
God beyond our eyes, strong love to see
Endlessly what never ends in you and me.
Pavel Chichikov
November 4, 1994
THE BLACK VIRGIN
The Blessed Virgin and her Child are battered—
Black Virgin—tracks of tears run down her face,
Emaciated, stilled in constant sorrow
Her eyes are bloodshot, clouded, not by grace;
Her robe, deep blue, a perfect shabby midnight
Is moonless and impervious to grief,
Embroidered with a flood of golden stars
White thread shows through degenerate gold leaf;
But see the Child, His robe is ruddy red,
And see His face, serenely unconstrained—
What does her Jesus see to make Him happy:
More mystery than Trinities contain.
Pavel Chichikov
November 5, 1994
HYMN TO THE WORD
The Son is the Word
The Spirit the Life
The Father its Reason;
Hell is disorder,
Heaven a hymn
Earth a season;
Sing all together
Praise of the One
Praise of the Three;
That all may return,
Words to their sense
Fruit to the tree
Pavel Chichikov
November 6, 1994
DAYBREAK
The calm of the morning breaks the day
Like an egg of streaming shadow—
Last night the wind, an orphaned child
Screamed and howled, wept and mourned:
“Come back, Daddy, come back,”
But sun had fallen toward Capricorn
Leaving dark voids in the trees.
Wind scratched and overturned the world
But all he could find was a pile of leaves
And the nests of birds that have flown away.
I too feel calm and know
That I shall see my Sun,
Shadows of His name
Inscribed behind the trees.
Pavel Chichikov
November 7, 1994
VISITOR
A tame heart came to me
Obediently
To flutter and stretch its wings,
In such a frame
That every name
Contained within my reckoning
Could fit inside this fluttering thing
And yet within my palm
Declare a wordless psalm
The mold of its striation
As perfectly
Refined as any chanted Mass,
And in its wing
A windowing
Compact and yet a glass
To let salvation pass
So flying did this church
Upon my finger perch
Pavel Chichikov
November 8, 1994
A CLOSED BOOK
I’ve seen the tree of heaven human beings can grow:
A woman in a doorway, laughing at the snow
Moscow in the darkness of a cold hard frost
“The chance to stamp your documents, citizen, is lost”
A dark door of oak is shut in his face
The hardness of laughter obliterates our race,
Red shoulder boards and a tunic colored grey
Gives her authority—so what can he say?
“Your permit’s expired, your time has run out,
Get your arse out of Moscow, here’s a door in your snout”
And what can she say? It’s the office that laughs,
Closing time’s official, and so’s our epitaph:
“Human race deficient, condemned by a laugh.”
But once I saw an icon with a Virgin dark as wood
The tears on her cheeks were her Son’s dried blood
Her robe the faded blue of a dying afternoon
Emaciated mother well-acquainted with doom
Unnaturally large and dark her face
Like the sun behind the cloud of a storm taking place
But the face of the baby that danced on her knee
Was shapely and solemn—how could it be?
Peaceful and calm, the infant held a book
What would you say if He let you take a look?
Pavel Chichikov
November 10, 1994
COMFORTER
For A.B.
Tarns of molten setting sun
Poured from burning ducts of night
Seep away, evaporate
From tundras of the stratosphere
(Those empty
silver steppes)
And leave the winter, miles above
To curl and cover all beneath—
The stalwart darkness, freezing ponds.
Goddaughters too,
Remember You
Who spread
This coverlet
Above
The rocking
Earth
And cradle—
Autumn
Sunlight
Sets.
Pavel Chichikov
November 15, 1994
SMALL HYMN
For A.B.
Pinkscalped baby,
Covered with a skin
As smooth as chamois
Lamb or puppy-thin,
You look inside
Your crescent puffy lids
And pout, and close
Your fist at what’s within,
No dream you see
But something rare
As common as
The universal air,
We might remember
But have not,
Debased by language
And our rot,
A wordless language
May begin
Contrition for
Essential sin—
If all your milky
Song is there
Profoundly somnolent
In prayer,
Then cradled life
That has no end
Within your mother’s arms
Let God defend.
Pavel Chichikov
November 16, 1994
HE DESCENDED...
So tired that he wore away his face
And sorrowful so all the trees bent down
Like broken backs that bear a slag of burdens
He came at last to every human place:
The Valley of Gehinnom and its boredom—
I saw him there, and though an acrid smoke
Of burning rubber hid the Lion Gate
He shuffled through the ashes of the dim
Where even living angels suffocate
And brought them up again a second time—
The city of the blessed is built with lime.
Once again the prophets fill their lungs
And while they walk they prophecy in tongues—
The Via Dolorosa of the dead
Has walls of honey, cornices of lead
Pavel Chichikov
November 17, 1994
WHY DREAMS ARE BUSY
For Rachel
Ancient owls working nights
Flying squirrels, cats and mice
Voles in honey, restless bees
Bats of dreams that live in trees
Sniffing dogs, quick raccoons
Sipping milkdust from the moon
Snakes in grass that coil in layers
Virtuoso cricket players
Barging beetles big as birds
Creeping slugs and rabbit herds
Foxes, lynxes, stepping deer
Silent-going pair by pair:
Stop to listen to your snoring
Start again their dark exploring.
Pavel Chichikov
November 19, 1994
IN THE FOREST
“Get back, get back,” the forest said,
“And if I meddle with the dead
What’s that to you? There’s nothing here
That lives again that you must fear,
White violets growing in the snow
Don’t resurrect a spring you know
But flower in another season,
Growing for a different reason—
Out of caves will come the bees
Of Lazarus’ antipodes.
Be quiet then and let me think,
In timely pools she comes to drink
To see reflections of a face
That once disturbed she cannot trace.”
A gentle doe that moves alone
Is all we know and all we own—
Be quiet then, and do not move,
She steps uncertain of His love.
Pavel Chichikov
November 19, 1994
THE GOOSE
The farm dog breaks his chain
Trots off into darkness
Who called him out and who
Will seize him by the throat?
I saw that corpus melting
Slowly into earth
Not as far as God
But only to the spring
Deep in a cloudy pond
Brown as eyes—
Carp with brazen sides
Sink in mud and sleep.
All falling, all melting,
Dissolving one by one
All Souls unhelled.
Pavel Chichikov
November 20, 1994
BENEATH THE MIRROR
Catching fish with lumps of bread
Small children watch a shivering lake
And no one sees the drifting pike
Or knows the lidless gar’s awake,
Ripples like a seamless bell
Ring reflections of the sun,
Above each carapace and scale
Across the silent lake they run,
Then catching dark and rotten limbs
They slap and make the sound of fins.
To ease and let the sounding dark
Prepare the daylight for its work
Is better than to let the daylight
Solute be to those who lurk.
Pavel Chichikov
November 21, 1994
THE CHURCH
The bell rings on, in every field
Grey and brown the day is wild
And winds that harvest afternoon
Are threshing night from flesh to bone
Slugs like spotted leopards crawl
From gardens to the garden wall
And every swan defends its face
Beneath its wing from winter’s grace
This church without a yard of death
Exhales on high its saving breath
And pentecosts have far to go
When drafty rooms of winter blow
A nave of diamonds rises high
To cross the transept of the sky
Pavel Chichikov
November 22, 1994
MARY BRADLEY
1766–1883
An adze of headstones scrapes away at time
But stone itself is blunted on that fist,
Angels of the infant dead have arms
But granite falls and breaks above the wrist,
Sweet scripture of a century ago
Made shallow by the sharp expanding snow
In copper-plated limestone makes an end
Of all we ever bury of a friend.
Mary, in a bucket made of wood
Carried cold spring water from a well,
She came to Pennsylvania as a child
Not dying till a hundred mountains fell,
So heavy were the seasons till released:
Her well-beloved son became a priest—
As he might pray for me were he alive
So I for him above his mother’s grave,
As One for me may seasonably come
And lift away the silence from the sum.
Pavel Chichikov
November 28, 1994
TO THE POETS
The mouse’s aim is never to be heard:
The cat from ambush kills the calling bird,
Spiders building mazes for the flies
Choose the darkest corners to surprise,
All weakly things and small can flourish ever
Persisting in obscurity most clever—
Then who would burn a candle in a basket?
It is Our Lord Himself who had to ask it.
Pavel Chichikov
November 29, 1994
ADVENT
He is nothing elsewhere
Nothing born,
And if I go
To frontier darkness
Away from the fire
Will He be there?
But we are here
Say all the angels
In crowds and masses
We live in darkness,
And when He comes
In all the light
Of trumpet stars
We sing His praise
Holy, holy, holy Lord
All emptiness
And light is Yours
Pavel Chichikov
December 2, 1994
THE RED SQUIRREL
For Rachel
Under a pine tree I woke from a nap
To see a red squirrel who wore a red cap
Her tail was all bushy and fiery red
And so were feet and her flanks and her head
She moved like the flash of a flame in the dark
The only red squirrel in forest or park—
All other squirrels are grey as a cloud
That fills up the barrels and thunders out loud
But this little squirrel as red as a beet
Skimpered and scampered on fast little feet.
How did I find her? the others were grey
Or black as the night when the moon goes away
But squirrels of redness are rare as a sky
With pumpkins for planets and galaxy pie.
“Where did you come from?” I said to the squirrel
But all she would do was to chitter and quarrel:
“None of your business, I travel alone—
Away to the forest,” and then she was gone.
Where did she go? I hadn’t a clue,
But she had her secrets like me and like you.
Pavel Chichikov
December 2, 1994
INSIDE THE WALL
Do you think all rain is water
And all that flows has form and breadth
Or that no man was resurrected
On the third day of his death?
You will see a virgin horn
Break the forehead of your lover
You will see inside a wall
A quail chick piping, run from cover.
Death will make a fool of life
Instruments a virgin mother,
But never since was resurrected
One of us for one another.
Pavel Chichikov
December 3, 1994
THE UNWALLED FORTRESS
I saw the devil of mistrust
More fiery than any lust
In him all charity defiled
With hope is never reconciled,
Each opaque hell contains a name
That burns with eversmoking flame
And lightless conflagrates the lie:
The garment of my enemy.
Conceive then any place of light
And there in place of lies my sight
Where nothing stands except the blessed
Translucence of a hate confessed
And all the rooms of hell replaced
With one transparent dwelling place
A citadel without a wall
A shadowless defending all.
Pavel Chichikov
December 4, 1994
WHAT WE MADE...
From the black wool He made
The night, the dark, the storm clouds—
Night is woven when all is light.
We made the dark tones of the flute
And thoughts of death.
Graves are woven
And all the lonely dress in blackness.
Death is woven from the coarse black wool.
Pavel Chichikov
December 6, 1994
THE GO ROUND
A running horse that’s made of wood
Motion of what never lives
Flights of wingless, harmless geese
Pull their chariots of bliss
Dragons breathe a heatless fire
Unicorns unvirgin seat
Innocently on their saddles
Innocents who swing their feet
Lights and mirrors suns revolving
Marches bugle, wheeze and thump
Cowboys, knights and cavalieri
Whip their chargers on the rump
And round again on their unreal
Perpetually mobile wheel
Pavel Chichikov
December 6, 1994
A CLEARING NORTH WIND...
A clearing north wind will allow
The elevation of this host
The wind chimes ring—
Look up and praise the sacramentary of light
So from the bottom of His church we can
Say vigil of Aldeberan
At zenith’s end.
Let’s kneel beneath the blessing night
Let every blood and body now
To praise our holy burning frost
And let communion taste the lips
Of all the buried dead and lost.
Pavel Chichikov
December 7, 1994
THE DRIFTS
Arthritic oaks have lost their pain
Their bulging knuckles clench and rot
Disheveled by November rain
The leafless branches cleave the wet
And blessed darkness, close the sky
Uncovers nothing bright and high
Leaves of darkness fall again
Revealed in every step of sense
Another season covers mine,
Drifts of lifetimes, cold immense
Novembers of eternal hours
Fall in neverending showers
All around see lifetimes fall—
Let nothing trouble or appall
Pavel Chichikov
December 11, 1994
MYSTERY IS BORN
A quiet sea comes up to every door—
Stop and wait, a tideless sea has come,
Approach from westward, eastward is the sun
Uprising toward a temporary shore—
Quietly, as if a beast were lapping,
Waves that lick the cold unfeeling sand
Stir and wake an infant newly born
Mouths a grey immensity of wind—
Then bells that move without a tower ring
To make a proclamation of the dawn:
“Bow down and pray an honor to the king
Of silent oceans, mystery is born.”
Then genuflecting suddenly with me
Worship at the everlasting sea.
Pavel Chichikov
December 12, 1994
THE LOOK
All created universes, each inside the other
Walk along a thoroughfare, sister after brother
Leaning forward, chins outstretched, pacing heel and toe
Thoughts like pensive pendulums swinging to and fro
Bobbing heads and weaving shoulders, thoughtful eyes opaque
Every head contains a cosmic tantalizing snake
Eden an unmeasurable place within the mind
Burning with expressive fire, angels are confined
Galaxies from ear to ear, nightmares of the brow
Heavens in a cortical and convoluted now
Hyperspatial innocence impervious to bliss
Opens, effloresces in remembering a kiss
Every individual a miracle to praise
Universe to universe complacent in a gaze
Pavel Chichikov
December 14, 1994
FEATHER ROYAL
Feather royal on white-barred wings
The blue jay floats but never sings
With sable mask and upright crest
It carries ivory on its breast
Light as empty songbird shells
A shuttlecock though self-propelled
It levitates from ground to limb
And cocks an eye as sharp as wind—
If I saw an eagle so
Astonishingly to and fro
As weightless as a fist of grass
But noisy as a bird of brass
I’d sing a hymn to Aquilae
Were eagles common as the jay
Pavel Chichikov
December 14, 1994
THE MOVING
Annunciating angels speak
But only one she sees,
Silence in the garden
Perches in the trees
Falling from infinity
A messenger appears
Resting in a moment
Longer than a year
Solemn heat and shimmering
Mounting up the wall
Summons the infinities
To supplicate a girl
Look between the shadows
Mary sits and sings
Now inside the shadows
The moving of its wings
Pavel Chichikov
December 17, 1994
SCOUT
A tower does not remember where the watchman stands—
Agree with me that nothing is remembered here—
But when the watchman comes at once recall
How cold the sea wind and the fog of fear
That drifts in as the starlight falls.
He listens, not seeing far, but hearing footfalls—
Clawed feet scratching on the shale below—
And the sound comes in from seaward, taking steps
As if on solid ground and smells as though
White brine had covered all the water’s salty lips.
The watchman sees white shoulders rise from there—
Upward from the shivering weeds—
The saltwhite shape of something never dead:
A sterile but voracious mouth that feeds
On motionless and decomposing dread.
Watchman rouse the living, bring up
The living from the mortal sand
Call out militias of the drowned
Battalions shod in leather—foot to stirrup
How it rides, remembers how to ride the land—
The all-dissolving sea is coming.
Pavel Chichikov
December 17, 1994
CHRISTMAS PARTY
For A.B.
Time to be quiet now
Baby at peace
Warmed by the nursing
The breath of the beasts
Many the stars
That burn overhead
Light for a coverlet
Manger the bed
Close to His cradle
Cockerels roam
Splendid as kings
In wattles and combs
Sheepdogs the servants
Donkeys the lords
Oxen the choristers
Lowing the words
Now in the silence
Modest and weak
Mouse and her nestlings
Rummage and squeak
High in the rafters
Swallows have nests
Choirs of pigeons
Sing Him to rest
Court of the angels
Heaven has choirs
Never more faithful
Than beasts in the byres
Pavel Chichikov
December 20, 1994
THE LODGER
I came remembering, drew back the soil
Lay down on rootlets and a bouncing coil
Of castings made by many delving worms
Mole mattresses compact and terra firm
A coverlet of stones contained this place
And held a down of soil above my face
I stretched my legs and yawned beneath the trees
A winter current made the bedclothes freeze
A grave as cold as seven endless winters
Yet soon enough the blanket warmed like embers
The pillows of a sleeping maple root
Propped up my neck and grew around my foot
Above through loamy windows in the ground
I saw December mauve and grey around
Where hills breathe through the centuries of sleep
While dreaming myriads of cloudy sheep
As good a grave as any bed to try
Is soft enough to rest in when I die
And hear the larva and the beetle grub
Against the living crocus rub and rub
This nether place, a dormitory earth
Has much to recommend if death is birth
And every sleep falls short enough to pass
When summer light comes raining through the glass
Pavel Chichikov
December 29, 1994
THE HOST
The cat is intelligent when she sniffs
She is a sacrament of one
Her life the prayer of pouncing monks
At service in the warming sun—
Penance never, never needed
A nap becomes her antiphon
Charity the hard green look
That blesses what it rests upon.
The cat’s a deacon and not a priest
Confession, sorrow will not hear
Precious flesh abiding now
In whatever host is near.
Through her, with her, in her lies
The salty blood that God transforms
Whatever passion’s in her death
Christ breathes in—receives her breath.
Pavel Chichikov
Undated
THE CHAPEL
There was a chapel heaven bright
Inside a whitened cell,
Round windows two
Revealed one new
And crucifying hell
Treasures and an altar stood
Behind a wrinkled veil,
One vigil flame
Extinguished blame
Though darkness was its hood
A sanctuary vaulted up
Containing wells of thought,
Immensely deep
To draw and keep
The quenching of a cup
Beneath, a reliquary crypt
Reserved a buried sense,
Inside the vault
No mortal fault
Effected recompense
The dura mater of His brain
The churches of His eyes,
A toughened wall
That covered all
His fleshly sacrifice
He built in us as we in Him
No common flesh or fear,
Behind the stone
Of One alone
No heaven came as near
Pavel Chichikov
December 30, 1994
BEASTS
Tassel of the greening hill
A poplar sapling grows
Cold the northern interval
Where cattle muck and low
But then begins the rising up
And twisting of the trails
Hemlock and the alder grow
In creases of the vales
I saw last night above the field
The spreading of the deer
That pull the stitching of the night
And thread the moonlight air
Smooth as needles gleaming
Seamless and undreaming
Pavel Chichikov
December 30, 1994
END YEAR
No coiling blizzard fear
The worm of snow not writhing
Inside the streetlight near
A rain is improvising,
December is a wet
Unfrozen silhouette
Shifting is the dove
The possum gleans the yards
Cats in the alleys move
Like sudden leopards
To find the shaking mice
Forsaken of the ice
Not once has winter buried
The crocus in the drifts
The violet is unhurried
In the black mists
The flimsy petals draining
Droplets of the raining
Pavel Chichikov
December 31, 1994
GALLEY SLAVES
Lost is faith—it is a bride divorced
O herald sea
We are the ancients—future time is lost
God’s plenary
Legends disremembered—This is a sea unloved
O herald sea
Today is history—and then mythology
God’s plenary
O herald sea
Nothing saved—this ending of all ends
O herald sea
Compose our will—but take what He amends
God’s plenary
Intentions fail—but something comes about
O herald sea
Though nothing moves—a wave sieves in and out God’s plenary
O herald sea
We have our names—in languages unsaid
O herald sea
Benches worn—the mountains to the bed
God’s plenary
Then one more pull—the ship begins to move
O herald sea
A forward track—but water fills the groove
God’s plenary
O herald sea
The ocean rests—but we go on the same
O herald sea
And nothing moves—the legless ones are lame
God’s plenary
The heat unseen—there’s nothing of a sun
O herald sea
And no one comes—pull down the golden One
God’s plenary
O herald sea
We pull forever—smaller than the sea
O herald sea
Waves from somewhere break incessantly
God’s plenary
O herald sea
God send
Pavel Chichikov
January 2, 1995
MY NAME
My name is Christopher, and on my back
I bore but only once what I have lacked
Small child and yet a bigger one has never
Weighed so much—a burden of forever
My legs are long, my shoulder bones are wide
But he from breast to hackle rides astride
The waves come forward surging on my shins
In all my strength I stride against my sins
Deeper on the bed of stones I sink
As yet although I thirst I may not drink
Until the ford of Majesty is won
And I have carried through His only Son
No fasting vigil, prayer or penance I
Have ever practiced, yet my Lord is dry
Praise Him who died for mercy on a tree
Who child and man and traveler bore me
Pavel Chichikov
January 3, 1995
DEVONIAN WATER
Gelid windows form across the creek,
All amber agate, isinglass of frost
Locked within, a luminous long room
But dimly moving, ferrous and antique—
Insatiable, the gravid holiness
Of time unrationed immanently flows,
But which direction, sleeping or awake?
Nothing born—this January—knows.
Wide mouths, bronze carapaces, fins,
Black bodies segmented and jaws
Of coal-grey salamanders innocently sleep
In tepid currents, ignorant of sins—
As if this giant time below a glass
Were living once again behind the past
And parasites of some enormous will
Had made the frozen water flow uphill.
Pavel Chichikov
January 4, 1995
COMMUTATION
Innocent as forest fires
Destructive as a fire storm
Charity ignites desires
Ends by keeping sinners warm
Corporation rats and magpies
Misers of a frugal day
Spend their careful hordes of lies
End by giving all away
Charity and death are equal
Plus and minus, minus plus
One’s the end of all that’s evil
The other is the end of us
Pavel Chichikov
January 5, 1995
THE WEDDING
On the finger of Eve
Adam spears the iron ring.
One winter-blooming daphne buds
But the cruel hooked rose
Scourges mist with scarlet grapples.
All dust
Awaits the end
Of our incessant brood.
Without one word
The mass of life bears down
Gives birth to more
Than metal rings
Or wombs of clay.
And then how beautiful
These brainless living things
And then how flourishing
Each winter day.
Pavel Chichikov
January 7, 1995
GOLD, IRON, SULPHUR, LEAD
Beside a wall of massive gold
Which does not weather, age or yield
I see a guard of iron stand
Blackened sulphur screen and shield—
It has no eyes or any face
A cylinder of lead on end
Contains the turret of a mind
And thinks dark charity: defend—
The sterile torso has no heart
Or looping gut, it does not bleed
Or pustulate, respire, rest,
And never feels compelled to feed—
Disfigured angel at the wall
A blackened paradise within
A fortress of impenitence
Metallic pride, unyielding sin
Pavel Chichikov
January 8, 1995
ANNUNCIATION
For J. V. E.
Only one story
Comes down the long tube from heaven
And the breast of a white bird—
Pure light pours in
From the whiteness
Outside the diamond glass of shadows
The sky’s white sun—
The noon glow
And the Virgin listens
She hears but does not see the wings—
Defracted particles
Of light that sing
For in the being
Who laughs invisibly eternal peace
Bloodflesh of light
Will never cease
Royal cope of cherries
Robe of the river’s deepest blue
And a frame of wings
In every hue
Like passion laughing
In the air of the cool grey church
The fond petition
That will not touch
And yet will sound
In the concentrated love of intercession
Like resonance—
An angel’s mission
Her eye of seeing
No grasp retains of infinite temptation
To hold the knowing
Of annunciation
Pavel Chichikov
January 9, 1995
VIRGIL
A sleeper lifts himself by pillows
As runners by the bootstraps run
Until beneath the sacred willow
That shades his purgatorium
The guide of intradreaming comes
To lead him from the shadows
Out through open fields of vision
Virgil thrusts the sun with hands
And rises with a deft precision
Toward boroughs of the apple lands
The homeland of all indecision
Where orchards of intention stand
Compression of the dream is up
And he the root of other trees
Like fire blazes step by step
Illuminating loathsome ways
For sleepers rising by degrees
From rotting flesh to incorrupt
If there I could by harm or grief
Discover apples red by red
And carry back as if a thief
The living apples to my bed
I would disprove the dead belief
That nothing rises from the dead
Pavel Chichikov
January 11, 1995
IN LOVE
Something in a human love is sorrowful,
Pity for the passing self, compassion
Or beloved memory, the never
Once again of decomposing beauty
Yet love of God there is somehow
Without the self and pity, grieving pain
Untouchable remorse or intimate default
There is instead engrossed annihilation
That fills all counterfeit of self with joy
And nothing but the syllable of Him
The cadenced infinite, the Word
In love—the word of God forever—
Each phoneme one beloved said and spoken
And all in Him one syllable unbroken
Pavel Chichikov
January 11, 1995
FALSE VERDICT
King Snake supple black and yellow
Grid of ebony and morning
Round the arm of Adam’s woman
You coiled, a bracelet self-deforming
Your beauty smooth and passionless
Flexible reflected light
Embraced infatuated Eva
Soft and hard you fastened tight
Cold of eye, expressionless
Lucifer of night
Fearless climber, thoughtless hunter
Efficient killer of regret
You in forests what you seem
Invisible in silhouette—
Who would find malevolence
Or dark insatiable intrigue
The impulse of your innocence
To glide and coil and feed:
It was the sin of Adam’s mind
To curse your kind
Pavel Chichikov
January 14, 1995
FLORIDA
Shadow government of grackles
Parliament of poised egrets
Senates of the snake-necked swans
And ministries of owlets
Black-shelled turtles scrape a quorum
Siphon noses ploughing mud
Bluegills caucus in the shallows
Veto larvae from the flood
Little herons, storks, anhingas
Alligators on the shoal
Legislate the laws of eons
Turning forests into coal
Rains of years fall into pools
And only men are stately fools
Pavel Chichikov
January 15, 1995
THE CAVE
Green python river’s lazy rolling
Curved enamel scaled by falling leaves
And palm trees shedding frizzled coir
The stream uncoils between saw tooth palmetto
Bream and bluegill floating in its guts
And blackshelled turtle siphoning the muck
It flows not monstrously but wise
Green backed, dim and yielding underneath
Time unconstrained and copious with herons
Cormorants and serpent eyed egrets
How can it know and yet remember
All the centuries it has engulfed
In sliding mouths of constant flowing?
The warm sun moves this ectothermic stream
Which does not writhe except in faithful contours
Prayerful shrugs against the nether bank—
It is godfearing, heavy and prudential
Denning in eternity and coming out.
Pavel Chichikov
January 18, 1995
ESCAPE
Death is something that goes in circles
A worm, a snake, a poisoned bee
Death returns to its derivation
Death from mouth to mouth again
Death the archetype of monotony
I did address a grave diversion
Four dead men—or the four winds
Or the four colors of death’s rainbow
Were dumbly eulogized by me
Blue and green, red and black
Round they went toward the finish line
Angels fanned with paper wings
All were tasting death’s white jelly
Insensible the swarms of words
Twitch their legs like dying bees
Death’s black honey my pilgrim’s share
I went alone toward the dark trees
Pavel Chichikov
January 19–21, 1995
THE HUMAN MIND
The human mind is less acute
Than larvae gnawing on a shoot
No locust, chafer or mosquito
Dressed in godlike indignation
Blames an earthquake for creation
Thereby proving innocent
Insects more intelligent
Than anthropoidal incognitos
And Adam stupider than beetles
Pavel Chichikov
January 19, 1994
PUNCH AND JUDY
All piety infected
Black prayers of rhetoric
Gangrenous the swelling
Of the wounded derelict
With all our eyes averted
Grey skinned, a mumbling Punch
Judy stays her pace
His head is twisted three o’clock
When six is face to face
And all our eyes averted
Foot an oozing sacrament
In the calyx of his sock
Slime and blood the exudate
The stamen turning black
With all our eyes averted
See the swollen madness
As pustular as kindness
Or charity infected with
A rheum of common blindness
And all our eyes averted
The winter sun is chalk
Covering his chair
All of us are passing
Who never stop or stare
With all our eyes averted
Pavel Chichikov
January 23, 1995
WINTER SUN
Long vibrating sun of January dawn
Red still penetrated by the kneeling black
Deeper than the blood of living beasts
Black scarlet, dried carmine, long in wave
A tidal necromancy of the soul
A flood through naked coral of the trees
A massive corpus lifting from the night
A crimson wave ascending from the water
A genuflecting ponderable sun
In prayer and meditation on our nothing
Your waves hematic roll, infuse the branches
The batlike-bodied oak leaves hang and chitter
And as the sixth and second planets shout
They fall and briefly meeting gutter out
With all of immortality dispersed in glare
The life unseen suffusing everywhere
Pavel Chichikov
January 25, 1995
TRUTH CONFESSOR
Truth Confessor never breaks the seal
Tall priest whose face is known but never named
All secrets come to him who never speaks
Who yet absolves the wordless of their blame
I saw the face of water kneel and flow
He listened to the words erase a stone
All time confesses variable sins
By all the many falling into one
How many sins the appetites confessed
And yet with hunger swallowed up the blessing
Thunderstorms anonymously blessed
And apple trees were ripened with confessing
Pavel Chichikov
January 25, 1995
THE MOON-HORNED BEAST
Quarter-moon to crown his head
Star of Venus on the crown
Anthropoid an almost man
Grinding flesh to make his bread
Feeds the yeast of many trees
Fires ovens with the forests
Kneading children water dough
Grain of mountains is his harvest
Grinning hot and round of crust
Loaves of sacrifice and ashes
Cooling in amorphous dust
Skulls of eucharistic masses
Slaying-murder is his church
Common blasphemy the priest
Altar of uncommon dread
The table of the moon-horned beast
As if a long-abandoned dog
How your mercy follows me
Grimacing and cowering
Unrequited loyalty
God the long-mistreated cur
Wears the whip’s imprimatur
Anthropoid the moon-horned guest
Wears the planets on his breast
Pavel Chichikov
January 27, 1995
LION FIRE
What do I live for? says the bird,
Seeds and gravel, worms and stones,
Then wherever I live and die
Other birds will peck my bones
What do I live for? says the snake,
Mice and lizards, eggs and birds,
Then however I slither home
I cast my garment afterwards
What do I live for? says the beast,
Yellow as summer afternoons,
Chase and kill the smoking meat
Live forever dying soon
What do I live for? says the ape,
Walking upright, speaking words,
Nothing but my heart’s desire,
And that was lost in lion fire
Lion fire rounds the garden
Paradise a fence with flame
Cherubim defend the faith
Consumed in agonies of shame
Pavel Chichikov
January 28, 1995
TRINITY
With grace digestible as fruit
To make all simpler for you
He built a universe of brick
One room, one sympathy, one view
Outside the window kindly see
One star, one world, one continent
A single house of one room too
Yourself return the gaze you sent
And here no time is ever spent
Economy of happenstance
Impedes the holy poverty
Before and after innocence
One person in this universe
Preserves a double effigy
But never in this loneliness
Will ever be a Trinity
Pavel Chichikov
January 28, 1994
THE SHRINE
Ever I had died
The exits closed on me
On radio proclaimed
As one who’d never be
The parks secured by dusk
The birds dismantled nests
Icy were the pastures
Grass packed up in chests
Faint the Father’s Pond
The lime trees overcast
Little Bronnaya
Gloomy Moscow vast
Birch in verdigris
Clacked their bony clefts
Ice the fleece of sheep
A warp in winter’s weft
Now the winter ravens
Told Her of Tikhvin
“Friend of ours in winter
Let mortals follow sin”
Then she rose in sweetness
Gold and meadow red
“Ravens of the river
Follow me instead”
Warm her yellow pathway
Sweet the autumn birch
Following the candle
Shining in her church
Silver was the framework
Darkened was her face
Bowing were the candles
Flaming in her grace
Pavel Chichikov
January 30, 1994
NODAY
The sun is leaving
Farewell, farewell
And where it is going
No one can tell
Dim the day
Flaccid the grass
Drooping the leaves
In night’s trespass
The stars appear
This afternoon
Venus shines
On the earth too soon
Birds retire
And mice with wings
Twitter and flutter
The crickets sing
Smaller and smaller
Becomes the star
Where is it going?
Is it going far?
Smaller and smaller
A shield then a spark
And all the seas
Clash in the dark
Colder and bigger
The waves rear high
And then in silence
Stiffen and die
Oceans, mountains
Come to the night
Starlight starlight
Starlight bright
Pavel Chichikov
February 1, 1995
BLINDNESS
Behind the altarpiece sits God the Father
All can see Him yet the crown of grace
Shines with only commonplace effulgence
Motes of dust obscure His shining face
Lappets of the forests touch His shoulders
Spume of diamonds hems a mantle sea
Yet before these polychromic glories
Penitents compress their miseries
God the Father sends them light to pray with
Solid as the mountain of His throne
Dispersed between the fountain and the altar
None can see the Father, but the Son
Painfully descending from the cross
Prays beside the sightless and the lost
Pavel Chichikov
February 1, 1995
ADORATION
I went to see you Lord, beneath the cross
Not to clack the beads or mutter words
Indemnify a loss or loss avoid
But there to lose the drift in gentle sleep
To sleep upright and by my sleeping pray
Whatever peace might keep of peace today
So you behind the window of your eye
Kept watching silently for silent snow
Significant as psalmodies from ambos
For each long wave of sleet and wind
Is like the Fall unsinned, a blizzard fate
By harmony contained, hexagonally made,
And you from everlasting calmness came
To one asleep awaking from a dream
And smoothed the waving blanket of the storm
The freezing wind to let the corpus warm
Pavel Chichikov
February 3, 1995
EYELESS NIGHT
An evening rush toward dark, a milk-blue field
Snow and ragged alders pollarded by wind
Grave hemlocks pauperized, by frost revealed,
A grey stream turning blacker in the blind
Dementia of February light—
What standing creature moves a human bone?
A pine tree moves in motioning the night—
Whose breathing strides my footsteps in his fright?
The bellows breathing is my own
Uneyed serpent runnels of the creek
Smooth and probe the barrows of their beds,
Alone, decapitated as they seek
Their senseless, blunt triangulated heads
Now in Jesus’ name it is the dusk
Where nothing finds a motive in the snow
Needing none infatuates a lust
For seeing rage where malice never goes
Pavel Chichikov
February 4, 1995
JOSHUA
This morning once I saw his burning bush
Not more perhaps than just a solar flare—
The wild southeast of winter’s hush—
Strong and lurid in a seething prayer
Majestic in its solemn sullen rage
Speechless, imageless, unfair
And far, adored by sycophantic clouds,
An omen of a later heatless glare
But still within itself unblamed and proud
That said “see me,” as if it spoke aloud,
Exhibitionistic and indifferent star
So great and yet without a brain to bear
An unashamed beauty or despair
All-seeing us without a looking eye
And truthful, though not needful of a lie,
A self-sufficient comeliness of light
Unconscious in its mockery-delight
That when I once approached to hear it speak
It burned and climbed though lacking any will
In voiceless blazing symmetry stood still
Till Jericho surrendered to the weak
And Eliyahu mounted on the air
Pavel Chichikov
February 5, 1995
PHOENIX
Could the world be set on fire?
Only if the world were drier—
Flagrantly a hard small spark
Precedes resumption of the dark—
Dry the oceans first before,
Wet planets make a tinder poor
Winter forests dry as thatch
Supernova for a match
All of earth should conflagrate—
What God creates He uncreates
Molten minerals produce
The daffodil, the oak, the spruce
Permanence is consolation
Still unseen I know a door
(Behind the wind I am unsure
Of every shape a soul may take
When souls and bodies both awake)
That leads to where a phoenix burns—
The living from the phoenix learn
Then as bright as fire’s flesh
Pass through what they have seen before
Pavel Chichikov
February 6, 1995
WALKING HOME
Now in the sleeves of an old white coat
The owl hides and clears her throat
Through the milk of the afternoon
She begs the night to find her soon
Deep in the woods where hemlock grow
Blue and bluer with drifting snow
The empty sockets of the wood
Grow eyes of dark incertitude
The ash and maple bend and groan
And wind like water roams alone
The hungry ravens whet their beaks
Above the path the traveler seeks
The drifts are high above the knee
But up the hill toward home goes he
And hears the breath come from his mouth
Upward, higher, home is south
Pavel Chichikov
February 8, 1995
THE FELLING
Beyond the maple-oak tree glade
I hear the knock of startling blades
The white flesh of the ash tree springs
And driven steel like sorrow rings
Sorrow’s pain is evil’s better
Sorrow’s torment our Creator
Sorrow’s tree that carries one
Cross of wood and then falls down
Back and forth the parallax
Of lunar saw and solar axe
As all the men and women fall
One by one so down come all
Down they come, their branches break
What sorrow needs our God will take
Our sorrow breaks and needs the limb
But no love lost that sorrows Him
Pavel Chichikov
February 9, 1995
JACOB
Now he stops and reads his book
And nothing passes but the street
Frail and youngish, thin and stooped
As motionless as walls and trees
His work is to be mad today
The office of the mute he reads
But what he thinks no one can say
Except to follow where he leads
Up and down the sky is tall
Escaping angels writhe aloft
And shout like boys who climb a wall
“Come up with us, our sky is soft”
If only he could see the place
From which the curb goes up like smoke
Reflecting print returns his face
And mirrors are an angel’s joke
Angels in relenting light
Reach out their hands to pull him in
But though he feels their appetite
His madness is a discipline
Cramped and straitened, stunted grief
Grows up a tree without a rain,
Planted in the morning street
He will be late for work again
Pavel Chichikov
February 10, 1995
PERENNIAL
Suppose all life from clay to clay
Is one fine cosmic winter day
The kind that winter often sprouts
When crocus pokes its petals out—
The sun-devoured dirty snow
Sinks back to show the grass below
All withered like a mummy’s head
But green enough, and myriad,
To grow when there is equinox
And shoots of snowdrop mix with phlox;
But then the February thaw
Grows insolently cold and raw
And slaps the flowers underground
A brutal, normal turnaround;
There is no other way, perhaps
To see life’s bright uncommon lapse
From universal desolation
Than death’s declined interrogation
And consciousness a nanotrend
Between two nights of neverend;
But if I would see more than this
And hope for something more than bliss
That gathers like a fattened seed
And goes to ground a mortal weed
I come to nothing more or less
Than what my sacrifices bless
The stubborn will to undelight
The confiscating appetite,
To live eternal in one breath
That gives and loves and conquers death.
Pavel Chichikov
February 11, 1995
FROM THE TREE
Fat crow and shiny on a ragged oak
Bow and warn the frozen fields and flocks
Torn as rotten sheeting is your throat
And guttural the sending of your croak—
Pliers are your mandibles of black
Buttoned are the buttons of your eyes
Frostbite the plumage of your breast
Your winter-shrunken stomach is a sack—
Lanky flap the crutches of your wings
A beggar on a boulevard are you
But then you commandeer a squirrel kit
And pulley it aloft on spider strings—
Heartless and commendable the crow
And those of us the same, the same we know
Pavel Chichikov
February 12, 1995
CORPUS
If God gives, I will assume a name
Floating in a sea, my mother’s womb
If God gives, crawl up and sigh
Slime of heaven’s heart
If God gives
If God gives
Light my eyes will see, all shadows’ wings
And birds of sight disclose my heaven’s light
Descend like spirits, flaming summer bright
And all
One fall
A coming
From forever
To my height
Sublime my heart
If God gives
With all
His voices
Risen to
One tomb
He sings
If God gives
If God gives
Pavel Chichikov
February 13, 1995
WARBLER
A pile of smoky feathers and a head
Are all that’s left of what has overwintered
Not even blood or bone deposited
Inseminates the frost a thaw has splintered
A feral cat, a possum or a rat
Has carrioned or killed the grams of meat
That exercised, with black and yellow cap,
A song machine arrested by the sleet
The eye that snapped with black is numbly white
The insect-pecking mandibles unpinned
And plumage that companionated flight
Achieves a black annulment from the wind
Now be deathly innocent of grief
Decay the splendid beauty and its thief
Pavel Chichikov
February 15, 1995
WINTER’S GLASS
Winter’s glass, transparent frost
A lens of night by day is lost
And rivers flowing brown opaque
Are carried off by duck and drake
Silent paddles are their oars
As breast to breast they pass the shores
They disappear behind a bend
The current finds the future’s end
And there a self I do not own
Is carried swiftly to its home
All silence is identity
The future, past and now are three
Divisions of a single law
A soul subliming in a thaw
And nothing consequently lost
Except the shining of the frost
Pavel Chichikov
February 17, 1995
BASILICA
The first sleep is over, and in the dark
The next sleep begins, and he awakes
Beneath the dome of memory, pantocrator—
The cherubim and angels of an open door
Look beneath from curving space and time
And see the past and future meet as rain,
The black floor gives nothing to reflect
The circumstantial shuffling of the intellect
Walls lean interpenetrating left and right
But never meet in curving through the arch of sight
The altar is an exponential apogee
An apse behind receding to eternity
And he awakes from recollecting night
Where living darkness vested in the sacristy
Pavel Chichikov
February 19, 1995
SNOWMAN
Heavenly invention of the melting snow
At first the one we built was Adam’s positive
Round head, white heart and frozen through and through
A blood of crystal, moody, hypersensitive—
If covered by the clouds the sun withdrew
He braced himself and postured in the wind
And when the February thaw broke through
He negatively sagged and melting, sinned—
Even God-expelled our Adam-Eve
Though weeping did not melt away like snow
But nothing that’s sublimed can be retrieved
Evaporating lives the ones we know
Our vapor that’s solidified a season
Can laugh and speak and exercise its reason
Pavel Chichikov
February 19, 1995
GROUP HOME
The swart cough of a sintered lung
Expels the mucus from his breath
The one whom we shat forth as dung
Consumes a purging cigarette,
Even blizzards suck him forth
To occupy a darkling’s porch,
Smokes he night, the night smokes him
A faceless coprolitic torch,
Mad and meagre, singed and signed
Not one surprise he ever knows,
His indigent dependency
Is only burned but never grows,
And we who keep him pass as grace
That never pentecosts his face
Pavel Chichikov
February 21, 1995
THE EXECUTION
Endless afternoon’s in place
A wedge of hours limes my glass
Summer welds the shadows’ mass
Against the pavement’s carapace
Heat and vodka flick the bait
And words like piscine flickering
Uprise and show the scaly trait
Of gossiping and snickering
Drink the drunken afternoon
Imbibe as if the summer flowed
The sun a punctured ur-balloon
Is soon to crumple and unload
Those faces flushed with summer blood
Remembered now as sensitive
Departed or corrupted wood
My brain their representative
As dreams we thought ourselves alive
We embryo realities
Our life too plausible to thrive
The death of sainted sanities
How real were they, are they, those men
And women of the summer heat
They lived or might be living then
If ageing memory’s complete
The summer shoots and will shoot yet
To pay a violated debt
Oblivion that will not rest
The sun a bullet in the chest
Who will forgive? no grace
Absolves a mimicry of dying words
Before and now and after this
We execute more thieves than gods
Pavel Chichikov
February 22, 1995
HOW DEATH APPEARED
An arm recurved and made an arm
The first event would be a brave self-harm
Before there was a sympathetic brain
An Abel self-created by a Cain
The block reached forth and carved a reaching self
Its arm extended from the conscious mass
A cube of solid unforgiving stone
It was itself creator of itself alone
Then to show it was the self-elect
It separated self from self with neck
Curls of granite flew away like blood
And that is how the stone self-understood
The head emerged by carving self creation
Gouging eyes to see its own dimensions
Weeping found itself afraid of night
For comforting the stone created light
After light it stabbed and pulled a mouth
Nostrils dug for breathing in its worth
In to live and out to speak, it said
I am myself the everliving bread
A torso with immense self-giving pain
Was murdered out of granite by this Cain
Then by referent self-making art
It made and set to pumping from its heart
It wasn’t life but self-regarding clone
That carved itself unmoving from a stone
But then it caused its walking to begin
By splitting leg from leg and sin from sin
A moving stone would never come to live
Unless it learned the lesson to forgive
Though head and body, heart and moving leg
It was a granite self-despising egg
It turned in six directions never seeing
Another carved comparison of being,
So pitying the Father on His throne
Returned the self-created to the stone
Pavel Chichikov—February 24, 1995
GOBLIN
Under winter-blackened leaves
A pedestal of dirty snow
Elf-altar, wind-carved table
Dwarf that will not melt or grow
A stub of manna, weird taboo
Preserved, a capuchin of dirt,
Snowfleshed manikin that grew
Squatly with a maple shirt
And also in the breast of us
A goblin of resistant cold
Is buried under rotting leaves
Prolonged but never old
Pavel Chichikov
February 25, 1995
THE SHALLOWS
In the face of water as it flows
The shoulder it bears to the shore
The gloss of the feathers of ducks
The shade of green leaves sliding
In the mass of clouds
The heavy lean of winds
The gospel comes, good news
That all is ending well
That never ends again
The shallows of His eyes
All the living seek
Who nestle in the reeds
Pavel Chichikov
February 25, 1995
FIRST FLOWERS
Celandine and bitterwort,
Speedwell, veronica
Shrug and pull their boggy socks
Just above the equinox
Flowerets the size of eyes
Squinting in a mole’s surmise
February’s flock unsealed
Scattered in a soggy field
First to flower and to grow
Patches like unmelted snow
True as ikons
Early yellow
Underneath, a buried fellow
Beak and body gnawed upon
February’s tomb is ice
Buried like a bird is Christ
Pavel Chichikov
February 26, 1995
THE INSURRECTION
Barely kindled is the meagre sun
When all at once the battle is begun
A pair of silent ordinary crows
Is having at a hawk above the meadows
Freely in the prairie of the air
The intersecting parabolic pair
Slide in almost frictionless attack
Against the raptor’s talons and its back
Glancing at the delta of its rudder
They cause the prince to jink and then to flutter
While commoners of crows within the trees
Are set to common cawing as they please
They chatter in their sub-Edenic talk
About the sinless hunting of the hawk
Pavel Chichikov
February 26, 1995
GREY FLOCKS
The sky says nothing southern and the bent
Laryngeal cherry speaks no words
Commons of the subsoil is our Lent
Eyelids of magnolia buds are blind
For eyes themselves are shuttered by their rind—
Tongues of dogwood smother on the curds
Of undigested holly from the birds
And March of paralytics makes a month
As water rain dilutes a rain of turds
The penitential winter has not sent
(Though February kneels on mucky knees)
A green replacement for the chickadees
Those flying balls of sooty excrement—
This cemetery season shovels Spring
A corpse digs up itself, uncoffining
Pavel Chichikov
March 1, 1995
THE ROOM
When Lord-God opened Adam’s head
(Our primal father was in bed)
He saw what no one lives to tell
Abyssal truth, a somber well,
Forever—in a cranial cup
From which by grace He drew it up
A foaming drink of solute time
A mix of mercy, chaos, rhyme
And then He held the blackened brew
In starbright fingers running through
A fall of everliquid night
The tendrils of immortal sight
And this we drink whenever sleep
Rips off the cover of the deep
But such as we, in footing’s slip
Take only one—a mortal sip
Though even that upon the tongue
Makes vision drunk, senescence young,
And so I saw beyond a room
Through window glass nocturnal gloom
And there a wolf beside a pool
A world wolf waiting, hierodule
Of something old, unsatisfied
That never lives but never dies
And we within though dream-enclosed
Are still expectant, real, exposed
Pavel Chichikov
March 2, 1995
OMNIPOTENS AETERNE DEUS
The throne of judgment is a room
He can as spirit fit Himself within
Intimate, we two alone, discuss
What particle of good, what of sin,
Face to face, a face I can endure
Disposes to confession and to cure
I am the woven thread, He is loom
Omnipotens aeterne Deus
Basilicas of space
His chapels range along the nave
Hazelnut dimensions cover us
He in mercy frank disposed to save,
A friend He gazes in my fearful eyes
Nothing I have done He will despise
A face I can endure, this loving face
Omnipotens aeterne Deus
Every word I warm with love
For words of His illuminate like suns
Do not be frightened of His gentle syllabus
No hypocritic judge He is like earthly ones
Though Lord of finite minds
He is the loving face and vision of the blind
Sees within, before, and from above
Omnipotens aeterne Deus
Though great, as small as I
He is my equal in humility
Equal more to every trust
For He returns eternity to lending thieves
Gives His love, all-creating God
Even them who scourged Him with a rod
If they be gentle now as was the lamb
Omnipotens aeterne Deus
Pavel Chichikov
March 3, 1995
FORTY DAYS
Was it the desert, the Arava,
The devil led our Jesus through
The desert of the earth, the red,
The ochre and the distant blue?
How terrifying day and night
One blind of midnight, one of noon,
The tent of sunrise blown away
The tent of David’s sterile crown—
Our desert of the endless test
Has no escarpment, bedouin,
The empty and unlimited
Ends nowhere or Jerusalem
Pavel Chichikov
March 5, 1995
SAVERS
From the parapet of peace
Jerusalem the uterine
The sacred amniopolis
I threw myself to space
And he who caught me by the foot
A saver of the seraphim
Then dangled me as once did John
A fish to show a fisherman
And said: “I will in future time
And many times catch up this fool
For though its Lord was tempted once
It will be tempted as a rule.”
The angel sadly set me down,
A bawling urinating clown,
That first one of the miracles.
Pavel Chichikov
March 6, 1995
ONE BABEL
Late winter rain becomes a sea
The sea a mountain-gulping snake
And if the world were small as me
I might an eyelid-refuge take
To build a cabin in a pore
And use a lash to semaphore
The sea would rise about the nose
And cast its breakers on the bridge
Disturb my browhung safe repose
A physiognomic sacrilege
And there in Babel I’d complain
Against this disrespectful rain
Still the drowning sea would rise
A seacave make of both the ears
Flood the skull with cold surprise
A roaring foaming aquasphere
So then amongst the sodden hair
I’d find the refuge of despair
But even worlds are smaller than
(Compared to everlasting God)
A living woman or a man,
Sheltered as the peas in pods
They grow in safety on a vine
Between the rain and harvest time
Pavel Chichikov
March 8, 1995
THE VISITOR
The wind goes ambling on the earth
And nudges down his blackthorn cane
Light goes lightning down the side
From cloud to earth and back again
The wind goes on from place to place
The clouds like puppies in a trace
He stumbles on a wooden church
While rambling south from nervous seas
He rattles windows, shakes the pews
And notices by slow degrees
His Lord and Master in a hutch
Whom none may see but all may touch
Why have they put you, Jesus, Lord,
Inside a house so small and low
Come sit upon me, Master dear
And travel with me while I blow
From Cancer south to Capricorn
To sound the equinoctial horn
The Lord says nothing in reply
But listens while the fibers snap,
The wind sits down in empty pews
And sunlight swivels in his lap
Until it’s time to blow again
The vigil ended with his Friend
Pavel Chichikov
March 9, 1995
THE WEB
In cords of humid silver
Arachnids bind and purl
Tense and pale as platinum
Mesh adheres to worlds
Tangled on our buildings
Windows shut and sealed
Wrapping in its glisten
All the sun reveals
Masks opaque and trembling
Forests held in shrouds
Tents of smothered flowers
Stationary clouds
Webs of sterile sacking
Shrouds of binding lies
Spinnerets forever
Secreting from our eyes
Pavel Chichikov
March 13, 1995
DYING BIRD
The dying bird spreads out its wings
Sphinx of death in life give answer
Breast to earth no salvo sings
What commonplace do you encounter?
How much my rigid pity stings
As if the poison pinned my soul
To see a pretty thing despair
Instead of melting into air
I will like you display in death
The reach and poise of feathered wings
For since all birds and men lift breath
Their flying speaks and speaking sings
And both beloved of the One
Exalt the rising of His Son
Pavel Chichikov
March 14, 1995
THE LAND OF UNLIKENESS
The land of unlikeness where Nazareth sees
Disciples sleeping under the trees
Oil of His blood drips from His heart
And prayer from His praying without any art:
“Let me not go where comfort is blind
Under the olives no comfort to find
Only the meaningless shadow and moon
That I must disperse in beginning at noon—
Body and blood is oblivion’s bread
Torn and devoured as soon as I’m dead,
Pressed in the pressing, oil running out
Darkens the ground like a shadow of doubt
And all that I know has come to this few
Who leave me forsaken and sleep in the dew.”
Pavel Chichikov
March 17, 1995
EMPTY TOWN
The little grey dog runs down the street
Lost and alone its Lord to seek
Frantic eyes and swollen tongue
Heaving chest and pumping lung
Tracking through the compass rose
Away from what the mongrel knows
Following scents and signs of meat
A bloody bone, a bitch’s heat
Now it’s dusk, dark to come
It can’t remember where it’s from
Gutters dry and alleys dead
Empty, empty mongrel’s head
Only the thoughts of Kingdom come
Go back again where they came from
Pray that mongrel may be found
That runs alone through Empty Town
Pavel Chichikov
March 19, 1995
BUSINESS
The son of Man is taken
Not for bread and salt
Silver bread is broken
For which the Man is bought
Snatchers in the shadows
Steal the Child of life
Soother of the sorrows
Butchered with a knife
Chief of all the robbers
Gibbets improvises,
Perjury and slander
Summon the assizes
Commoners and paupers
Gamble at the cross
Merchants and marauders
Sell Him at a loss
Watchers and betrayers
Denounce their only hope
Torturers and slayers
Strangle on their rope
Selling as they borrow
They notarize the debt
He the Son of sorrows
Paying for it yet
Pavel Chichikov
March 19, 1995
SANCTUARY
Ghost of remorse, and ghost again
Dissipates in the summer sun
Waterfalls around the rocks
Fall and fall like ticking clocks
The clouds rise up to block the view
Of Edens old and Edens new
Walls of cloud with deeps and furrows
Catacombs and goblin burrows
Come along to see the cave
Of sanctuary Jesus made
And there beside the climbing flame
Silence, peace and mercy seem
As if a wall of cloud below
Receded infinitely now
Pavel Chichikov
March 22, 1995
THE RUBRIC
Magnolia holds its chalice blooms aloft
The outer petals purple, cool and soft,
A wine of anthers tightly sacrificed
Is drunk within from linings of the white,
Kneel and sip the congregating bees
That toward the first of April drink these trees
And mockingbirds puffed out, with seedling eyes,
Begin their nesting, sing and sermonize,
Thrushes pull their sacramental worms
From pyxes of the earth, the garden berms
And starlings on the pavement of the grass
Are bowing their responses to the Mass,
Sacristans unfolding in the trees
Prepare the summer vestments of the breeze
Pavel Chichikov
March 22, 1995
SAY I
We’ve always known God, you see
But we don’t want to talk about him
Or look at him—
He follows us around with pleading eyes
Or sometimes hovers overhead, in the shape of a bird
Watching the fallow heat of a midsummer field—
In the legs of a large green grasshopper
With a striped belly
He jumps at our feet
And buries himself in the tangled stalks of hay—
He peers within as the oblong of moonlight windows
And pastes the floor with shapeless light—
He’s there but never there
And always I see him:
A dart stuck in the sky
Or a quivering bowstring, invisible—
Where I am to be when he comes?
Just wait, he says
Just wait
For I’ll be there when you need me
And when you need me, I’ll be there,
And I reply:
As much as I know, I know,
Say I
Pavel Chichikov
March 23, 1995
CANTICLE
Mother of mercy to you we cry
Banished from Eden your children die
Mourning and weeping our tears are rain
That falls from clouds engorged with pain
But now this morning the alder’s down
Burns the wax of the rising sun
And buds like tapers burst aflame
Held to a light we cannot name
Exiled here we may not sing
A canticle opposed to spring
Or see your Son with eyes grown blind
Or come to heaven’s gate refined
We mixtures of a joyful mud
Rejoice to see the alders bud
Pavel Chichikov
March 24, 1995
THE MEADOW
Coreopsis and cinquefoil
Around the spring of April coil
Inseparable from the rise
Of light’s ecliptic through the skies
Fields of thirsty springing green
Blades and lobes and spades are seen
Nesting circlets holding crowns
Of yellow heads above the ground
Images of light below
They vibrate when the breezes blow
And jangle silently like bells
Without their clappers or their knells
Trajectories from long ago
Cast the seeds to where they grow:
A Plantsman of the virgin prime
Thumbing Earth, a seed in time
Fertilized the soil of space
With some of time and some of grace
Pavel Chichikov
March 24, 1995
CREATION
The wind a random signal?
Nicodemus, wait, you will hear
The voice of the wind draw near
Elijah’s wind, soft, calm and thin
Chanting hymns of cherubim
Turning round their shining wheels
All the words the winds’ allele
White noise the Lord’s call.
Down by the river the water’s dark
Flows from the water’s running work
Spreads in the shriveled reeds and spills
Flowing among the April hills
A form like water, thin and black
And there the fertile night comes back
Pavel Chichikov
March 25, 1995
O MY RIVER
Do I end said the river, running, do I?
Showing its shining teeth to the sky
Over the edge of a granite shoal
Wavelets of ivory sparkle and roll
My end a beginning, vapor on high
I rain on a mountain and flow from the sky
Do I end? said the woman, lover and friend
Never, forever these messages send:
Over the edge of dying I fell
Flowing like water from heaven to hell
But then like a sun my Lord drew me up
And drank me like wine from His bottomless cup
Did I end? said my father, where did I go?
Over the edge of dying we flow
Down to the sea of forever we glide
As rivers of water flowed from His side
We from the wounds of the present and past
Drink of forever, ocean at last
Pavel Chichikov
March 27, 1995
PROPHETS
In daylight the water of speaking and sight
But all revelation depends on the night
Those who rise early, when day is asleep
Know of the hour when breathing is deep
And vision is inward, affixed to a zone
Exciting the dreamer beside us to groan
Dark in the valley of death comes the one
Who gathers the blossoms of kingdoms to come
Those of the past and the future entwine
Hands of the briar and hands of the vine
Blossoms of daylight and blossoms of night
Mix with the petals of faith and of fright
All that he gathers he holds in his arms
While birds of awakening sing their alarms
Pavel Chichikov
March 27, 1995
THE SHIPWRECK
An undiscovered island is the One,
Rises bluff and forepeak from the sea,
Lonely is the shipwreck of a woman,
Sons and husband dead, at seventy
Feral empty coast, a land corrupt
Sterile fevers infiltrate their dust
Serpents of her memories rear up
Scales of iron animate their rust
Loneliness consumes the iron dead
Loneliness the ribald and the lewd
Loneliness unspeakable and sour
Loneliness humiliating, shrewd
Abasement of the living left to live—
The only panacea is to give
Pavel Chichikov
March 28, 1995
PERFORMANCE
For T.R.
You train yourself to grief each day
To weep and to repine
Like dancers letting go the barre
Your dead in mortal grand jete,
Three weightless griefs who raise themselves
Above the soul, three greedy stars
To fascinate and shine.
As dead they come: “Do not repine, Therese,
Much safer than you living ones
We have no need to glitter grief
But let us living go, release
Absolves the soul who makes immortals dance
When they would be at peace,
Your husband and your sons.”
Pavel Chichikov
March 29, 1995
REVENANTS
A liter of whiskey every day
An insult to the brain
Another flings herself through space
Infatuate, or just insane
As if a door were opened
And nothing inside to see
Each soul of God who goes
To her impetuous eternity
I can’t listen—let them speak
Let them be found and followed
Return them from where dumb
Death has gnashed and swallowed
Would they kill themselves
Unraveled if they knew
How much of love to learn from death
When dying let them through
Take them—release them
Affirm them with Your name
We who could not listen longer
Accept the blame
Pavel Chichikov
April 1, 1995
MUSEUM
I saw the Pharaoh Lucifer
Aloft in a dark gallery
His stomach on a pedestal
His skullcap made of iron
And though he flew in place
His arms were stretched in flight
Iron legs away
Long hair streaming out
(Waves of metal hair)
Traveling through the air
Oblivious he rode
Unstatic not ecstatic
Silent, moving, still
Sufficient in his will
Where was he going?
In another hall I saw
A throneroom and a throne
A king was seated there
Emperor and slave
Arrogant of flesh
Red with brilliance—
But Lucifer departed
Unmothlike from the light
I would most thankful be
If he would not see me
Pavel Chichikov
April 3, 1995
O BLESSING
Just once to see
O Blessed God
The flightfeathers of the crow
The droop and twist of the long shafts
The light rebuffed
And then from the river scrub
A mockingbird, a hen
Roll her belly sideways
Wing the river then
Just once to see, my Savior
Heaven’s shadow
Pavel Chichikov
April 3, 1995
SEVEN SONG
Stoop-shouldered Pride
Slavering Greed
Eros the stupid
Envy the weed
Anger the swollen
Glutton the base
Lazy the witless
Falls on his face
All of them offspring
Of Adam the rover
Who gave up a kingdom
To scuff the world over
Roam the world over
To puzzle and sweat
From morning to moonrise
He’s doing it yet
Those are his children
His fatuous Cains
If Eden were his
He would do it again
Do it again
He never will learn
Though swords of the angels
Whistle and burn
Those are his children
Although he dissemble
The father denies
But the offspring resemble
Pavel Chichikov
April 4, 1995
THE IDIOT
You are old, the dying sun is red and
Life recedes, the warmth declines,
Spin decrepit world in five times ten
Hours of the ancient kind—
Old world, and you still graceful weave
Exhausted sterile seas, immense
Their saline waves heave up to sieve
And wash the withered continents—
One last human soul their guest
The battered hills his university
An immigrant from borrowed dust
He lives from sanity to sanity—
And still the serpent calls him back
Unprofited with old advice:
“Take up this fruit and nothing lack
And be eternal master of this paradise.”
Pavel Chichikov
April 5, 1995
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