The sky is overwhelmed
With the explosions of flowering stars from the fountains
Of Roman candles.
It is Midnight, New Year's Eve
I take a sip of wine
Amidst the pyrotechnics
And lengthily consider a forgotten god
As a new year bids me enter it,
Bringing along with me what is ancient,
What little there is truly known of it,
Bringing this forgotten god into the New Year
As I glimpse the future,
looking for doors to pursue entrance to
I rejuvenate what remains of Janus’s worship
With a toast to myself, to life, to the coming year
And to this ancient Roman god, Janus,
Worshiped at the time of Romulus and Remus
And without doubt revered even before by the early Italic tribes.
I wonder what there is to do next year
And what it will bring with it
And what it will bring with it
As I stand in a doorway looking into the sky,
Marveling as it continues to blossom
With fireworks at midnight.
They serve their purpose.
I am sufficiently inspired,
For there is work to be done.
Planning for the year ahead.
I take an inventory of my goals.
I turn to Janus, ancient god of movement and transition,
God of the New Year,
Meditating here in this doorway on how to best to enter
The doors I need to enter in the coming year
I resolve from here on in that every new year
Will spark a poem to Janus and the new year,
And each year I shall write one poem
Directly in his honor for as long as I live.
Janus Bifrons, I say to myself. Guide me.
May all gods guide me.
This is how every new year proceeds for me now.
I move from vision to vision, from commitment to commitment
With a relentless sense of the ancientness of time
And a reverence for its ancient, forgotten gods
And a great respect for the mysteriousness of doorways.
My feet are rooted in millions of years of human history
And my head is in the heavens.
I know how it feels to be a bird whose nest
Dangles in the branches of the stars, not quite homeless yet
Not quite at home.
In a precarious situation, always.
Moving through doorways that I am forever exiting
Like this one I stand in now.
I have visions.
And I see in a vision
The key to the gates of the ancient city,
Verily, to every locked passageway
Gleaming in his immaculate hands
His bearded face of flawless alabaster
Intricately carved
Bifrons Janus he was called.
I gaze on his statuary with a look, like his,
That is frozen in time.
Looking
forward, looking back...
Looking out,
looking in...
Looking
through...
Looking both ways
simultaneously…
All the infinite passages of creation,
Sky god of the utmost majestic of doorways.
Presiding at the Beginning,
Bathed in the pink of the first morning
Rising out of the glory of
Fiat Lux
Standing at the
thresholds of vast marble arches
At the beginning of the
Illimitable,
Letting open the gates of
the Primum Mobile,
Unloosing the virility of the First Divine Motion.
That sudden spasm of radiance, that piercing thrust,
That immense friction of collision
Of mystic vapors inside the heavens;
The feminine efflux, the masculine emission
Of an electrical charge
Breaking forth from the diamond plow of sound and light
Furrowing the womb of the Unmanifest,
Casting spiraling seed of lightning bolts
Journeying through inner channels of first conception,
Parenting the child of
the universe
In an atomic shower of sparks and stars
Shining in movement and stillness
Shining in movement and stillness
In the vision
All the architecture and sculpture of the heavens
Is ancient Roman
As I glimpse what the ancient Romans said:
He was the doorway
of creation
The reigning attention
of this deity's ministrations
The cosmic fiat of positive transitions
Amidst the primal chaos from which he was born
To an architectured reality of stable and balanced forms
Which he then oversaw, transition after transition.
The doorway of creation.
From the archeological and anthropological record I read on as
I ordain myself as the pontifex rex of Janus,
This god peculiar to the Romans
And with another sip of wine
Perform an intense vatic anagogy of his cult and myth
In my marrow
For I feel in my marrow that I once worshiped this god
In an other life.
Janus Bifrons.
In a vision I see
Here beside a wide and ancient river,
Abode of the numinous, these sacral waters chosen
From out of all the places in the world
To worship this god outside
The Rome of consciousness, at the natural border of
The Known and the Unknowable,
In between, the hand of a god at the doorknob of that chaos,
Turning the key
To the Unknown, unlocking the Manifest,
Pushing open the gates of creation
There He is,
Swinging open the gate for the other sky gods to travel...
road
Endless road,
And he their overseer, driving those roads in godly chariot,
Riding on the tip
Of the primal Uranic lightning bolt,
This god of motion not the Author of anything
On earth or in
heaven
But indeed present at the Beginning
An observer, a god of apertures,
Of keyholes to doorways of creation
And he the holder of the key
Opening and articulating the doors between realities
Like a Roman Magistrate
He held jurisdiction at the frontier
Of the empire of reality,
A bringer of civilization
Into the barbarism of the formless
Doors and Gates, and their opening and closing,
Were his secretariat, and in this tutelary
Some places were
fenced in, others fenced out,
Some subjects and objects were locked in,
Others locked out.
What had rapidly opened could just as rapidly close.
As executing officer of borders, his duties overlapped
With the gods of roads and commerce and shipping
And the god of war.
The god of opening became the god of expansion,
Territorial expansion and new frontiers,
And when Rome was at
war,
Which was virtually always,
The gates to his sanctuary were kept open,
To which he and his
priests held the key
In cognizance of the fight always coming and going,
From the
front to the gates of the city
And back and in between again
Going deep,
Cracking open the etymology of his name,
Pondering the most profound meanings
Of theonyms and divine epithets,
Belliger, Pacificus, Quirinus, Bifrons
The intense lineage of the most ancient words,
God's names and gods places, toponyms,
Words straight from the blazing forge of tongues
That bespeak and betoken the universe
Addressing eternity in language
As it holds a conversation with the world,
As it holds a conversation with the world,
Words that open doors, doors to the worship
Of Understanding what is Primal and Supreme.
Doors to the worship of what will always be
A mystery.
Imago dei.
