Bells Through North Beach

“Am actually not “beat”
But strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic”.
J.K.

  A
Clap within
The core of air...
Applause of rippling blue...
Peals of concentric light
Bursting through a carillon of clouds,
The tolling of light in the circumference of sight...
  One tone 
 Rumbling through the dome of sky.
Vast stone of golden sound splashing down,
Descending into the convolutions of the ear,
Spiraling into the primordial ...
Splashing waves clapping within the heart:

Ventricles, ventricles
Of sky, heart and bells 

Pounding  and pounding
One space
Over and over...
A basis for formless faith.

Bells, bells!
Like
Huge goblets overturned
Spilling
Sonic wine
Everywhere
Everywhere 
Through North Beach
And Beyond...

 Pealing belfries of air unpeeled
                                       Four cornered rush of annunciation
                                                                              A sky pounding above

  The City

Rumbling... ringing...tolling...bringing

A summons
To a place and time
 Here and now
 .....

I try to speak, my friend

But by Saints Peter and Paul
It is impossible.

Not a word more can be said

Within this discussion.
We have no choice but to wait
And listen
Whilst our thoughts lie flat,
Our tongues numb
From this concussion

                                   Yet rise and quicken
                                   And come with me.

                                   We must attend,
                                   We must swell and thicken 
                                   The Mass
                                   Of this silent body
                                   Transformed inside
                                   The transubstantiation of sound.

                                   And though you may say I am crazy

                                   We must cross ourselves
                                   At this entrance,

                                   Must dip our hand

                                   In this font of speechlessness
                                   Inside this god-forsaken room
                                   In which our soul is cloistered
                                   And let this immense volume of bells speak for us,
                                   Let it rebirth us,
                                   Let it be our very reason and Logos,
                                   Let it bring us to that which is unconditioned
                                   As we cross the threshold that tells us
                                   A glorious Beyond awaits, 
                                  One very eternal for those with any kind of faith.

                                                       Yet for now not a thought can be uttered
                                                       Until this clangor of bells that speak
                                                       Of the souls in heaven 
                                                       And the souls in hell

                                                       Has come to rest 

                                                       Like a rock at last reached the bottom

                                                       Of a vast well,       
                                                       Here amidst this congregation 

                                                       Of streets utterly profane,
                                                       Streets most sacred

                                                       Gathered here in service;

                                                       A hush of worship 
                                                       Lifting from the sidewalks

                                                       As we follow all these forms

                                                       Of liturgy arranged before us

                                                       Day after day, service after service.
                                                       Let us depart
                                                       And create our own eucharist
                                                       And create our own ecclesia
                                                       On the foundation 
                                                       Of these streets laid before us
                                                       As we have spoken.
                                                       Let our hands and hearts feed the poor
                                                       In flesh and spirit
                                                       And let the charity of our blood
                                                       Transfuse into this confusion
                                                       And let us bring health unto sickness,
                                                       And let us give to it 
                                                       Our entire essence

                                                       Whilst the bells 
                                                       Of Sts. Peter and Paul ring
                                                       This moment through North Beach
                                                       As we make the street
                                                       In the same way we invent the sky
                                                       In this golden eternity
                                                       That tolls...

Bounding, 
Bounding through a score of blocks
Pounding echoes into walls

As we walk through a maze
Of dim, derelict hotel halls
Inside penniless senses,
Barely making purchase of these corridors
As they end in an reverberation of  mirrors
That dissolve us...

All is void of identity

Only streams of silver...
Void nor not Void; neither not void nor not not void

There is no self or other 

Inside the face of reality's illumination.

Eh ma, There is no percipient at all!
All sworn!
Before the Great Seal of Moonlight
Stamping down this hall at noon.
 
We roll, we're rolling away, ma vie!
Past all of the lives
Mine, yours, theirs, ours...
That are going someplace
Without us
Abandoning us 
Along a way
In which no one can plainly see but
That very little of what they ever wanted
Was never received,
And because of this emptiness, 
They have wanted
So many things, almost the infinite ...    
Yet you and I like planets roll down the hall
With ephemerae of poetry, 
Drunk, so drunk...divinely, sublimely...
Hearing One Hundred Songs
As we pour past rows of  ragged, run-down doors
With so much doom inside,
Lost, closed together, yet like palms conjoined
And pointed toward some magnificent sanctuary
Beyond, 
Well beyond these tawdry floors.          
                

                And now outside...this, 
                This is the feast to which we are summoned:
                A long service of pavements -
                Naves of avenues
                Transepts of side streets
                The stations of the cross at a dozen cross walks
                Past glittering mosaics of storefront windows
                Down arcades of retailers like saints in  niches
                As the voices of cars from the quires of traffic
                Sing the canticles of office buildings
                Beside lecterns that bear the electric scriptures
                Born from the immanence of power lines
                As now in Communion we see
                Before the altars of commerce  
                Hands outstretched and yearning to receive
                From cashiers, customers, and tellers
                The quotidian sacrament
                Within the divine economy  
                And rising up, loftily, far in the East End,
                Behind the many pulpits of banks,
                The Rood of  high-rise corporations
                On which this world is sacrificed...
                Oh, gloria en excelsis!
                Wafer of pavement! 
                Wine of sound!
                We feast!

                Yet in the palms of the truly faithful below
                Such as we
                Bibles of poetry are read with devotion
                In pews of public park benches
                Beside fonts of holy puddles 
                Ringing in rainbows,
                This vision swaying from a censer of fog
                In which we breathe
                A din of essences illuminated by the votives 
                Of oncoming streetlamps and headlights,
                Billowing forth an incense of
                Formless forms processing down the streets 
               And alleyways of North Beach 
               To the jazz-fast metronome
               Of SoundLightMovementStillness

 

Another long swallow of sound

And my ears drown

In this reverberant wine

Bells, belly of sky like a bellyful of wine
Within the ear…surrounding and overpowering everything.
Ringing bells of

                                         Divine Remembrance...
 

I am drinking again
The tolling of the hours
Of my life pouring
With atone

I close my eyes with you, my  friend
Whom I will never really know, but only feel
Yet that is all that is needed
And listen with you to the flight of bells; 

See the flight of seagulls, the flights of buildings, the soaring 

Wings of high-rise corridors flowing into seraphic clouds of emptiness

Beholding alchemical angels 

At this hour come forth in secret
From Lower Assembly

To perform their select and holy office

Of decanting an immense and invisible glory
Down the towering steeple

That subsides into an altar cup   

 

The Moment of
Transubstantiation
Nothing Everything
A golden eternity
Air bread
Wine sound
Blood time
Body city
Atone

At that signal gesture across the sacrament by the priest
You must trust
                      There are wings
                                              Of blessing and healing there
                                              A gloss of invisible feathers
                                                                                        Like hands

Passing over the loaf and cup 

                                              As the faithful solemnly feast

                                              On this alchemic grace bestowed upon them,

                                                Going forward in peace...

.....

This is so, and so shall it be, and it is finished

As pigeons suddenly rise up

Into the Cloud of Witnesses

Towering above Washington Square

In a hosanna of saints and angels...

Wisps of fog and clatter of wings.

Wings                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Become

Wafer thin

In the distance,

Taken in

With a sip

Of wine

Merging between rows and rows of downtown buildings,
Rising into the ceiling of the skyline
Portraying the apotheosis of The City
Into a heavenly, heavenly San Francisco fog

And from a bag at a Washington park bench 

Outside the cathedral

We celebrate!

O Ignis Spiritus!

O Euchari!

O Ecclesia!

This loaf, this bottle...

You stand and rave
Loudly proclaiming!

"In our very thinking
Is an element that can be strengthened and deepened,
Through practice,
To penetrate all that our senses do not reveal.
 
You shout 

There is no division between faith and knowledge
-They're one and the same-
And there never has, is, or will be
Between the spiritual and physical world"

And now you really roll...

"There's no division between anything!"
And the lady and her miniature, 

Well, whatever it is, seemed worried. 

Even the dog.

And with a stride you stand on the bench 

"All  apparent duality is conditioned by the structure of our consciousness,
Which separates our perception and thinking,
But together they give us two views of the same world;
One visible, one invisible.
Neither has primacy, and neither is real
Yet the the two together are necessary
And sufficient
To arrive at a complete understanding of the cosmos.


Christ died on the cross for this!" 
Agghhh!!!
.....

I smile

Like Mahakasyapa

With a flower in my hand 

                                       

                                       From the bunch that you bought

                                       To shower on every homeless person

                                       You will find tonight

 

For in flesh

I am a few years older

And already know this.

I merely point

To the sky when you are done.

            But what the hell, I think

            We are poets, poets maudit

            And nothing we can ever say

            Nor do

           Can or will be

           Taken serious

And we surrender unto nonsense,

Knowing that we are already saved

And already enlightened

Despite ourselves

And thus we meditate and write

With the aim of going nowhere

And saying 

NOTHING.
  

                   And that is why we are most holy

                   Though our relationship

                   To The Church

                   As we stand outside it

                   Drinking

                   Is a most complicated one, 

                  And even more so our theology.

As Friday night arrives for revelry 

And there is

 

Wine
Wine, sacred and profane.
Wine for Mass
Wine for the masses

 

 

Tourists now arriving in North Beach
For beatitude, for communion, for anything.
Droves of urban pilgrims come questing the spectral paths
Of  those poets who walked here before and departed in fame
Now many times over translated from these streets
Into many languages.
They trace their footsteps, looking for some charisma left behind
In those alleys renamed in their honor
Near the holy shrines of bars and cafes

In which they read and wrote and drank
                     

                    And the reliquary of bookstores
                     That contain their canonized books
                     For sale, and very nearby, so too a  ton of pussy
                     That swings sideways from poles 
                     And dances in your lap.  

 
And there's no shortage of spirits here to drink.
I know.  I know very well.

This place is all still very alive
Where these poets made their mark.
An invisible X authorizing the site where they once stood,
This poet who left a signature of his spirit
And gave ecstatic witness to it all
Now only a  mood
Permanently buried in these streets 

As you and I stand off to the side 

And watch, unnoticed,

 Those who come in search of poetry and poets.

.....

 

And so the masses come to North Beach everyday
To eat, to drink, to shop and be entertained
To take the sacraments of culture in this precinct
To, in their own way, pray to this saint, this beatific, this canon,
This martyr, and this madman
Of the Church of Art. 

Street side cafes on charming side streets.
Wine on altars, wine on tables and bars
Decanting the wind,
A wind that needs to take in your four walls
Wafer thin
And listen to your blood
The entirety of the room summoned and arrested
Beside this wine in a bag on the floor

As I peer through my window

And realize that 

This is all a test

And attest to this...

Holy mind, holy page
Sanctification
In the substance
Inside a pain of window
Nothing
I have learned
Is everything

 

And mysteries hurt and I want out
Inside my mind is a broken hip, grinding
A scar left forever
From a wrestling match with an angel
One long night ago I think before I was born

           As I wrestle with the window
           Sliding open the sky and leaning far into it
           Wearing a sash of window frame, bare chested
           And loudly hollering for a rematch

From this overlook of North Beach
Pure perception, pure feeling
My friend
Yes, broken syntax, fractured sense
Compression of then and now into a sorcery of metaphor,
The entire collapsing of space and time into words
That stagger

And few adjectives to describe this
Beside many prepositions that
Must be left dangling
From balconies of fire escapes
That spill down narrow, iron ladders of the implausible
Burning in the confusion of subject and object
As we hang on, helplessly.
Our lives on fire

 

                         Suffocating not in smoke,

                         But in the rarefied heights
                         At the end of the rope 

                         That rings the bells, 

                         Trying to speak
                         As they toll for us
                         Whilst we clap

                         In the joy and peace

                         That having little in world

                                                 Brings...

Reverberating in it endlessly

Open window, sky, diaphane, dimensions
And make up a new mind
To invent this all
For the wind, the wine
Drink the blood
Of ink
Between the stars
Let the page be a wafer
“This is his body
  This is his blood”

We are making our souls worthy
Writing with the ink of our blood
Drawn from the well between the stars
Our bones are pens, our souls the point between speechlessness and the page
To write the universe a poem, a love letter to a total stranger
Us
Just us and god
In the beginning
We must not be too overt in our overture
Must find our range and sing it as best we can,
Knowing this is as best we can sing
Though the poem will never be finished
But in the end, we will tell the poem
We are god.

The angels answer to the blood
Hot, moist alchemical substance
Pouring into the retort of the page
Holding it up to the sun,
Turning it to gold...

And so to the dead who speak to the living
And the living who speak to the dead
Seeking a  Mysterium Coniunctis, a Magnum Opus
With every sigh when we rise from our chair
And take a step back, frustrated and lost
Because we cannot find words worthy to speak to them
And they not at all to us but
Through the pendulum of November bells that toll, 
not just an hour told
But lifetimes
Inside a window in which the transparency of the city glows
In a constant epiphany in glass and concrete...
Flesh of the world

Rooftops of infinity
Horses’ hooves down Columbus in the moonlight
The pyramid glowing in the distance
They all lead us somewhere;
Exhaustion and resurrection

Say a prayer as the jazz begins to steam from the brewery on the first floor
Bitches Brew times 3, a resurrection, an insurrection
As every ecstatic  note leads to exhaustion
And tomorrow the bells will ring again
And we will need to find the reason to write another poem
And will need to find the faith to believe there is a reason

And somehow
It and everything
Will be found just where they are,
Already perfect, beyond any reason
Arising without any effort
Just as the bells will always be on time
Beyond any, any expectation.
Forever capturing us by surprise,
Their sound alone enough
To save us

Notes: the epigraph is from Jack Kerouac. It is taken from Lonesome Traveler.

The reference to Saints Peter and Paul is the name of the long serving Catholic church in the North Beach district whose bells inundate the neighborhood when they call for Mass.

LVX
JAL