Phanes' Descent by Charles Bryant

This is an Orphic poem of incredible beauty by very talented gentleman I chanced to meet online. I feel that this poem is the very voice of the Orphic lyre...

PHANES' DESCENT

Persistent images of face and figure;
reproducing voices in my head
that echo in the cave-skull. Nightmare dreams
amplify the vision of one man
appearing superhuman in his rage.
The sudden cutting off, divorce, despair
leave me fatherless, an orphan child
wandering a vast Dickensian city,
vision of a London lost and gone.

Wingclaps as the dove descends
opening flower of the human heart
wriggling to a thin green snake
eight-rayed wonder of the waiting world.
First of the few, you threw yourself upon me.

Far apart are earth and air
but at the centre of the heart
- inmost purpose of the labouring mind -
is found the image of the golden egg.
The sphere is floating in a blackened void
unprotected and devoid of outward aid.
Who shall resurrect the lapsing soul
and lead it Hermes-like again to heaven?
Circling circling circling though the night
contaminated by the unseen force
but yet producing boundless light
a second image more severe and much more bright
unfixed from the iron orbit of the sphere
cascades vibrations through the depth
and through the height.

From smoking altars incense rises up
suffusing all the aspects of the moon
that slowly lifts above the distant mountain.
Late or soon the emptying cup
void and dry of tears
consumes itself in witless fears.
The moon weeps and the word is mute;
all mankind is turned to stone.
Unless quick lightning shoot into this mind
to grind to nothing the repulsive rind
how may we follow where the Son is gone?
The Son is gone to God and dwells therein.
Mankind lies vacant on the empty earth.
What can we do to win the splendid sphere?
How smash the torpid image of our death?
How smash the torpid image of our fear?
Resignation, resignation and decay...

Coiled incoiling in this crawling web
bright-eyed Maya lurking at its centre;
labouring through the womb of Mother Earth
blackened by the darkness of her soil;
hopelessly tenebrous in thought and deed
my body cannot put away its weight
nor my sprouting wings grow larger yet.
The birds have mocked me; the fish have cried salt tears.
Lilith Lilith issue of my thigh
enclosing bosom, cavity of pain
unless you rise with me into the sphere
we neither one can know our heart's desire.
Why draw me down, chain my fierce mentation?
Why slave me to the beauty of those breasts
at which the world and I must feed?
Why block the path to those supernal crests
and leave us here to weep and bleed?

The dragon sleeps. Night, with folding wings,
unloosening its hair across the world
comforts all the pathways of our pain.
Her warm and willing limbs,
the mesmer sleeping in her clouding eyes,
her silent subtleties of breath which close me round
and moonlight phantom of her curving lips
have made my pain an object of desire.
Enchanted by the slowness of her mind
reaching for the smoothness of her arms
I lapse away from consciousness and dread
and sink myself upon her body's flesh.

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