Hymns to Hermes

        

                      I

            O

You winged roads, you fleet

Bearers of the flashing infinite, of the golden

Cars of subtle and illimitable dreams on the roads of time,

Of the swift, fleeting dreams of the lives of ephemeral men

And passing gods

Whom endlessly commute your quicksilver paths

Making their way

Between waking and sleeping between day and night,

Between living and dying

Between these your winged eternities

Trodden by souls whose destinies

Blow in your wind.

                O

Your crossroads softly conversing between themselves

Like the whispering of swords, 

Like the silent clash of evolving metals.

The sword-edged stone of destinies,

That adamantine force of all lives

Perilously blown forth from your lips

Adrift beside these star-cut paths

Keenly forged through the infinite, forged through necessity,

Keenly forged through the infinite necessity

Of conveying All

Through the tumbling violet kiss of dust

Of stars and planets falling

Through dark space;

Projected into your swirling alkahest

Sublimating within the alchemical vessel

Of life and death, of stars and gods and men,

Rotating in infinite necessity.

                O

These whirling, empty roads

Of your perpetual breaths

Majestically uprising in magical revolutions

Of violet air exploding into a volatile dance

Of slashing etheric swords

Blown into the Flaming Body

Of Speech, the Body which never dies,

The body of endless revelation, the Path

To the end of perfection, the Way

Of the Word Made Flesh, the Mystery of

The immanence of the Logos.

                O

Continuous flaming utterance

Of the Word of Life

On the Wind

Gyring through the electrum landscapes of worlds,

Gyring through your endless alchemical  conversions

Of Sound and Light,

Into your most sacrosanct and sacred, lawless forms

Of gold and medicine

Brought forth with a sharp wave

Of your caduceus, Hermes 

Hermaphrodite, Psychopomp, guide of travelers

And protector of thieves, O, great trickster

Bringer of the message, bringer of the dance

Bringer of the ultimate journey across all barriers

                O

These your alchemic conversions 

Only long, eternally faithful conversations

Between two rare and invisible lovers

Clothed only in the Holy Spirit,

Nakedly moving through stillness

Along a sword, prophetically revealing to each other

Their ardent dreams of will and desire

To endure every fortune of initiation and adventure

Within the Five Dimensions

And be together forever,

Together amidst the distant falling stars of entire galaxies.

The rarefied stars of lovers

Transformed by you into magical, occult metals

And eventual, sudden gods

In the wake of your constant return,

               

                O

Hermes, you White Lion, who is the very power of transmutation

Throughout the ten ages of the timeless alchemical universe.

                                                II

            O

You winged roads, you goldening paths of Hermes

Nothing stops you, nothing holds you back.

Nothing halts your endless alchemies,

Neither their long suffering

Nor their immediate victories.

The fire and water with which you seethe untold mysteries

Of formative smoke,

This sacred, intoxicating incense of your Holy Spirit

Which inspires poetry

And all making, Mercurius.

                O

Your miraculous, quicksilver transformations and adaptations

Of the One Thought carried along your winged paths,

Converging into an abstract universe of

Vast conjunctions and  cosmic analogies,

Carried into flesh and blood,

Carried into the long circulation

Of the Procession of the Ages

Through the vast Body

Of the Eternal Idea

Of Man under God

And God under Man.

Turned over and over again

By you, Hermes Mercurius,

Turning in your magical revolutions

The Stone of Destinies

Which you roll to the peak

Of your hermetic mountain top

To stand and survey in a summit of solitude

The vast, unbroken flow of your illimitable knowledge of things

Which become quick, concrete reality, which become your verses,

Singing over and over your ineffable, nameless poem of the universe,

Playing on your tortoise lyre

The Lost, Eternal Chord

Which joins the Manifest to the Unmanifest

Singing rightly and precisely the Nameless Name,

Shouting Tetragrammaton, “Yo, Hey, Wow, Hey!”

                O

Hermes Mercurius,

You who churns with the sun, the moon, the Earth

Heaving forth the Stone of Destinies

Of the incarnate manifold

You in your winged sandals and cap upon sterling winds

Abarrel through the heavens,

I hymn you on your spiral way

Across the All’s Horizon.

I hymn you

                                As you turn those roads to gold, as you turn

                                Everything in time to gold...

Lo, within your blowing womb

You carry to constant birth - undying, unborn

The  lapis gem of the One Eye

Which perceives like Argus

Each shuttering, blinding moment.

The Eye of Insight, the Eye of Precision, the Eye of Calm

The Eye of Wisdom balanced within your spiral storm

Unblinkingly looking on like Argus

                At the telescoping million worlds

                Telescoping million spheres,

                Telescoping million planes

                Telescoping million stars,

                And telescoping million things,

The million points arising therein

And the million, million motes

And musical notes breathing within them,

Glittering like packed theaters

Trailing in your whirling progress

As you drive them like golden nails that connect

This express globe of mystery,

Making all these points appointments with Knowledge

Of you, Mercurius

               

                O

You bellying winds

So of and for yourself, so free

I hymn thee, I praise thee, and I am overcome,

For you are the wind that blows beyond

The gate of my eyes,

The wind that will someday blow

My life away through that windoor

Across the black river and beyond to Elysian fields

As yet you still blow across all life on Earth,

And what is hidden in you yet, you still explain

Endlessly at the end of your hammering sword of wind

That nails the heart back

To hear its own beating,

As everything falls back at the occasion or your arrival,

As all obscurity flees before your driven dance

As He who guides all souls.

Hermes, I say you are the child of love and knowledge and art.

I say you made love to Aphrodite, your foam born sister

And sired yourself when She gave birth

To the Hermaphrodite,

Your artifice and wiles unmatched.

                O

The sublimity of this terrible child of tricks, the terror of this thieving lord,

O, the sublimity and terror of love and its knowledge

Jeffers at Tor House

I felt the patience of things

In the crush of sand

Beneath my feet

Even the rush of surf

In which the foam of time swirled

Around my ankles

Lent me some patience.

And the cliffs above and their outcrops

Pummeled by the waves, too

Lent me some patience

As I watched the tide

Tear the cliffs invisibly down

And was hypnotized by nature’s display of power.

It was here in Monterrey bay

Near your home at Carmel Point

That I sought at times to come to peace with the world

As I imagined you ghostly roaming this land somewhere nearby me.

And I felt like you, Jeffers, as I pondered this world

That material and political conquest

Had gone too far

And that history was intractable in its rage of human corruption

And from where I stood along the ocean

I feared its clawing menace would overtake me

With all its powerful currents of  lies and violence

As I felt the magnitude of human evil and human ignorance

As an ocean in themselves

But I saw my steps as a new chance

To any but me, their only seer.

And I wrote poems along the ocean, most of which were lost.

Some were just written in the sand.

I was very young then.

Let those poems, those which remain,
Endure with the agony of a young fool

Who was learning of patience with his suffering,

Who stood in your shadow and the shadow of ages past
Along the ocean

And trembled at the thought of all the death and corruption

When the world was too much with him

And read your poetry
Because you were the archetypal California poet,

A man of the sea and the Carmel mountains, the Los Padres.

As you stood in those poems before the sea

You didn’t bring us the honey of peace of old poems, Jeffers,

But the memory of the sword

And all in all, your words bespoke a mania
With the world of war and violence

And an abhorrence of shallow man’s encroachment upon nature.

You were a misanthrope,

A misanthrope with pacifist and proto-environmentalist leanings.

You felt the answer

Was not to be deluded by any ideas of the progress of civilization.

There was something of Aurelius in you,

Something of Diogenes in you too, very cynical…

Yet from New York they called you a prophet

And with that you picked up a golden harp and plucked
One misanthropic note over and over again,
To much profit during your heyday.

With every snap of the waves you told us it was Man

Who was the monster, a being who tainted everything he touched.

When you brought us to the sea it seemed to only brood

On man’s poor judgement and his shortcomings.

You contaminated that beauty with the endless crash

Of sad human memory and of what it means to be an animal

Whose teeth are fitted tightly into the jaws of history.

No, I never quite understood your repeated loathing

Of civilization which you pounded like the stonecutter you were,

Nevertheless your stance on things left

An indelible impression on me.

As I left my impress upon the wet sand

And claimed the despair I brought there,

Being patient as a man with the ways of man.

I could not bear to taint this silent place beside the ocean

With my ill-feelings of what it meant to be human

By dreams l stood, longing for a better world.

And I knew it would never be found

Through your pessimism.

Yet, you saw your vitriol, I think, as some spite

Of empire, but you couldn’t untangle any hope

From the wrack the ages cast upon your shores