123
Oh, for that grand day when the bones of mind have crumbled to dust,
And the flesh of heart has been shredded to pure song-stuff without the least lust!
My soul will sing on each exhalation of your sweet breath
And on each inbreathing nestle back to your heart in desired death.
Only those who live in intellectual slums
Of creeds and hypotheses beg mere angels for crumbs.
We who have been blessed with the Beloved’s glance neither hope nor repine,
But are occupied with the matter of mirrors and the commerce of wine.
Our singing—still staved in flesh and barred by bones—is to entertain him
Who published his Song of Creation as the worlds of his whim.
Light-speed and sun-pulse are but metronomic indications
For love’s evolutionary theme and its involutionary stations.
And so I await the grand day when mind has crumbled to dust,
And heart has been shredded to pure song-stuff without the least lust.
A leap into a greater abandonment after the previous poem. Imagined is an opposite state where the sigh is God’s own and the in breath is a cherished sweet extinction.
Lust here stands for all self-desire. He writes for a world where few wish to make a clear distinction between love and lust.
Intellectual slums are created by those who choose to live within structures of belief. The only real freedom lies in the song from the heart. Flesh itself long to dissolve in the discovery that the story of the universe is the polishing of the wonderful mirror of self-knowledge. (The mirror here as in poem 119 is to help in the search for the real self.)Our present moments sings with the ecstasy of self-reflexivity, even though we sing from within the cave of bones. But notice that we are dealing with a possible future moment, rather than a present attainment. But there is no impatience here from one who has received the blessing of his glance.
A stave is a long strip of wood making a barrel. Here the verb means bound or confined.