Ode to Pan: Ecstasy and Terror
What if the terror isn't something we ever "get over"?
What if Nightmare
isn't a bridge we cross after paying the trolls' toll,
But IS the cross
The one we bare
--Sisyfus-style--
as we crusify ourselves on the Tree of Good and Evil
and swallow our own serpentine tales?
The Ring of the Lords
is the Oroborus:
It is cast of golden shadow.
Eve and Adam's wedding rings
Slithered on their middle fingers.
Did you know they honeymooned
At the forked tounge of the River Styx
Which is always to be found at the mouth
of our own estuaries?
Nature never "gets over" waterfalls or volcanos,
anymore than we get over our heart beating or adrenline crashing
through brains or the wetness
between legs. Earthquakes are Gaia's shudderings and shiverings
Typhoons her excstacies and exhilarations
geysers her ejaculations;
The Earth doesn't get over herself
Anymore than we get over our own nature.
She dervishly whirls
She accepts
She surfs.
She sinks into cavernous holes of herself
And spews hot lava and fireballs
As she waits out eternity in sandstone and alligators and blue whales
And calculates the sacred geometry of snails
and weighs the scales of dragons
In their scientific lairs.
What if horror is something we do
not surpass but at best,
undress?
Pan lives in caves on cool hilltops
and beds on damp forest floors.
He cannot resist a bonfire
or pulling down society's zipper
and feeling for something warm and pulsing inside.
He does this with lightening
speed and sharp fingernails,
or very, very slowly, with teeth.
The nympths tell me
he is also pretty good with buttons,
Undoing them...
pressing them...
He grows impatient
If the strip tease goes on too long:
He is always naked
And demands the same in us.
He plays at sado-masochism of the Soul:
It isn't a game, but a rite.
There are no safe-words.
Pan is sure-footed on the ledges
of our craggy fears.
He takes what he wants.
He wants to give.
He speaks in thrusts and tounges
Even as he licks our ears and when
we offer our jugular to him, when
We lay back and stretch our necks
And offer blood as if to fangs of vampire;
When we feel the truth in our veins:
That we share a pulse and chloroform with him,
He feels green and hard and heard.
Then, and only then, will he hold
His reed flute erect
All beast, all man,
And exhale raindrops and butterflies,
Blades of grass and bucking stags,
Daffodils, ancient oaks and thorns of rose
so that we can inhale his
fresh mountain air.
When we breath together this way:
The Horned God's tongue filling up our mouths;
The human moans echoing in the canyon of his throat,
The heavens and the Earth harmonize:
Pitchfork perfect union.
Enemy becomes ally,
War story becomes love poem;
A fallen angel re-pairs his mossy wings
The cross spreads it arms and ecstasy,
Ecstasy and terror are re-born
Yet another springtime.
By Amy Beth Katz (me) :)
February, 2015
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