Poem 19

I would lie a long night on your breast breathing like a child;
And you would not begrudge me my resurrection;
from the beginning of time, you have remained undefiled.

I crop silence. I unburden myself of mountains of civilizations,
of thickets of blood from which the tall trees escape,
of accretions of tears on ships graving-docked at stations in space,
of the wordiness of all false revelations.

When I awake, my vertebrae of twenty-six notes
will have been schooled in the music of silence,
and I will map out new singing continents
of vegetation without the curse of fruits,
of vision without the curse of horizons,
of love without the burden of illusions.

At the beginning of the poem we are skilfully led out of orientation in time – it is not clear whether he is remembering a past or expressing a wish for the future. And then time widens out to suggest the process of countless lifetimes and the untouched transcendence of the One in the process of evolving. The next stanza sweeps into three wonderfully varied types of cleansing from the enormous burdens of the past: its violence, the utter desolation of empty loneliness, and the babble of words from all the man-made systems of the past. In the final stanza we finally jump to a new birth where the poet is still a vertebrate in a body but schooled to musical silence, thought turns into song, actions grow without thought of gain (without fruit), vision is no longer tormented by the bounding and the distance of horizons, and love leaves behind all falseness. A graving dock is a place for repairing ships by taking them out of the water.

I get the feeling that this is one of those poems addressed primarily to the divine Master before whom Brabazon will recite it and from whom he will receive a rewarding embrace. Its originality and certainty disdain the canons of worldly judgment. It is surrealistic and visionary without any forced reaching out for effects. It is not directed to the world of cultured poetry lovers or worldly humanity.