The Janus Poems Part I

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

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

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,

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.