The Builder's House

The Builder's House

I
The builder's house is a horror to eyes.
The best with instinct run away
too bright with eyes tuned to
frequency.

They are the first who must get away,
an old eye prized to narrow band;
brilliant, yet selfish, until blinded,
found in streets with needles in the eyes.

except going out leads back by the same door.

All the great names ran: Jonah to the fish's
belly, better to be eaten. Pulled Elijah
out by the hair in Zorah, then he ran to Endor.
None of us can bear the way God sees us.

That is the horror at the builder's house.
He sees no man on earth, does not see earth,
but lives with us at the first creation,
that has no age, or line, or fault.

and because we have one gram
of hate, we are invisable,

and he has to call our name.


II
We were all searched and brought back.

I marveled at his machine, turned the
wheels and levers, hand in her hand;
but to be a king on the open highway
turns dark without juice and cigarettes

And there was a code set in the play,
I could not un-hinge the machine;
a thief cannot turn the master's sled.
Only the blade can run across the cut.

And then to get back in, past star dried bones
hats hanging where heads fell,
and the risk that lust and outside air
remain in lungs, guilt or self loathing

in the bed I sleep, where the cloak of night
is kept, a shrouded man next to me, shrunken
heads hang from his belt where burned carpets
catch the sequin drops like a painter's cloth.

But if I could see myself as God sees me
I could enter by a shorter way, draw
better in my mind a love that has no shade,
not stumble with double-hearted eyes

or color between the lines the sun.


III
It is a house of mirrors and perfect cunning;
all who go out must come back in again
brought back and stitched
till the knife's cut is a seal.

The folds of God's house are so angled,
so tightened at the joints all teeming cries
slant to silence going out before they exist
never warm with the sun except

as a circle exists at a circle's square.
Man is made like a circle, made with math
at the builder's wish and speaks in tongues
at a sound's square root,

mirror calm pools of water in the ear
still glass.

If I go out in a tall-built house
I come back in - where I began,
so long as the rooted math exists
my circled life is just and true.

Where line or mass or age implode,
or shake the earth on sea-born faults,
I count the builder's rooted math,
still my rooted man in sanctuary,

perfect at the builder's root.