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By Root 1098 0

of the bathwater, eddying into the millrace, back, back, and then, Crash! the Comet; it comes hurtling out of the dark space, gives Earth a blow to midriff, and, deflected in its course, rushes off into the dark again, taking some of the atmosphere with it, and, leaving Earth no longer circling sane and steady, but wobbling back and forth, gyrating like a top, and all askew, which is when the seasons were born, beloved of poets, but worse, the air changed, the air that they breathed which kept them sane and healthy, saying We in love and understanding for the developing organ in a celestial body which they were. The air that had been the food of sane and loving understanding became a deadly poison, the lungs of these poor little animals laboured and changed and adapted, and their poor brains, all muddled and befuddled laboured to work at all, and worked badly, a machine all awry, but always teased and tormented by a queer half memory of the time before they became poisoned and spoiled and could not think and hated each other instead of loving. And there hung Earth, a casualty, all amiss, but soon they forgot, their newly-poisoned air became their normality, a forgetting by vanity, and … but Crash, look, I’m on the other side of the Catastrophe, I’m before it. Though I’m free, too, to say “after,” since like “up and down” it is interchangeable and entirely how you look at it, how you are situated, as is backwards and forwards. But man-wise, microbe-wise, I am before the Crash and in a cool, sweet, loving air that rings with harmony, is harmony, Is, yes, and here am I, voyager, Odysseus bound for home at last, the Seeker in home waters, spiteful Neptune outwitted and Jupiter’s daughter my friend and guide.

All men make caves of shadow for their eyes

With hats and hands, sockets, lashes, brows,

So tender pupils dare look at the light.

In Northlands too where light lies shadowless

A man will lift his hand to guard his eyes;

It’s a thing that I’ve seen done in strong moonlight.

At any blaze too fierce, that warden hand

Goes to its post, keeping a dark:

Like cats’, men’s eyes grow large and soft with night.

New eyes they are, and still not used to see,

Taking in facets, individual,

With no skill yet to use them round and right.

Think: beasts on all fours we were, low,

With horizontal gaze kept safely from

That pulsing flaming all eye-searing bright.

Yet had to come that inevitable day

A small brave beast raised up his paw to branch,

Pulled himself high—and staggered on his height.

Our human babes have shown us how it was.

They clamber up; we, vigilant,

Let them learn the folly of their fright.

At that first venture, light stooped in salute,

Like to like, a shimmer in the mind,

And the beast thought it “angel”—as indeed we might.

One paw, earth-freed, held fast the slippery branch;

The other, freed, waited, while the eyes

Lifted at last to birds and clouds in flight.

And so he balanced there, a beast upright,

And the angel, saving what he’d hardly won

Jerked up that idle hand to guard his sight,

In that most common gesture that is done.

Man may not look directly at his sun.

I gotta use words when I talk to you. Probably that sequence of words, I’ve got to use words, is a definition of all literature, seen from a different perspective.

Enmeshed like a chord in Bach, part of a disc as exquisitely coloured as a jellyfish, all pulsing harmonies, the disc being a swirl or spiral, made up of sun and planets and baby planets and all their accretions, enmeshed, too, in Andromeda time, galaxy time, moon time (oh woe and alas) looking at the thing from any point of view but Earth Time, it is possible a change of emphasis from Saturn to Jupiter involving a change in all conditions on Earth and taking centuries (our time) may perhaps have had to find its message thus: That Jupiter fought Saturn (or Zeus, Chronos) fair and square in mortal (or immortal) combat and—not killed—but defeated him, and thereafter Jupiter was God to Earth. But here is a thought and not for the first time—of course not, there is no