GREAT PAN IS DEAD

GREAT PAN IS DEAD

Great pan is dead and a frenzied terror spread over

the Greco-Roman world like the abysmal dread of nothing

as two and a half millennia later the god of the Christocentrics

expired for not living up to its mythically inflated reputation

for resurrection and gentleness. Corporations are people, too.

La, la, etc. Is it a sin to lie to the dead? Who took

God’s confession on his deathbed? Was he forgiven

for the deathmasks of horror he wore like the black robes

and executioner’s hoods of the Court of the Star Chamber

of the sexually sadistic Inquisition? Psychotic thought police

in a world without the internet, despite the connectivity

of all life to the same convulsive nervous system on the rack,

a hundred thousand women burned at the stake

for witchcraft in the seventeenth century like a holy act

to keep the aniconic dream grammars of their blackest magic

from contaminating the superstitious demotic of the common people

who stood by and watched the flesh drip off their bodies like candles

as if something rigorously severe and good had been done here.

Loopholes in the lobbyists of the law they hung themselves with

like the old woman to whom was given a strong rope

as Muhammad whom the Muslims aren’t listening to

pointed out as an example of what not to do,

who unwound it into a thousand and one weak threads

like Sunnis and Shias trying to decapitate each other’s heads

before wisdom reached for the henna to die their hair

red with blood. I don’t think Leo the Tenth was what

Jesus meant, or Muhammad would marry his daughter

to Muqtada al Sadr as the Taliban murder Fatima

at the Battle of the Camel for learning to read the Koran

straight from the lips of Allah. Did you forget Muhammad

liked prayer, women, and perfume best, not the smell

of cordite, misogyny, the revenge of the cursed upon the blessed.

Your mother, your mother, your mother, then your father,

knows, haqq al yaquin, with certainty of sight,

what it’s like to carry you in her womb, from a gob of starmud

to the improvised explosive device of a terrorist

going supernova in the marketplace where she shopped

for your food, as if she gave a fig about how she raised you,

Allahu akbar, to surrender to a god, bismallah, ar Rahman, ar Rahim,

with a will greater than your own. Alif, baa, taa, thaa, jim,

as if the word were still mightier than your AK-47’s magazine.

You make orphans and widows of the life

you were charged to protect as mujahdeen.

Are the refugees still leaving Mecca for Medina?

Read the Hadith with your sister. Don’t you get the impression

Muhammad was a man with humanity and compassion you’d like to meet,

or give up your seat for on a bus, or run a foot race with

as if you were creatively competing with the spirit

of the female principle of Aisha in all of us, keeping us alive

like the roses of Shiraz or the mole on a young slave girl’s cheek

in Samarkand, the mighty capitol of Timur the Lame Khan.

Spare me the lectures, the details, the fatwahs, the sermons,

the theological alibis, the Hanbali miscegenations,

the creationist lies in the dark ages of the nightschools

of Texas and North Carolina. I seek knowledge

like evolution even as far as China, that Sufi state

of mind, or Ardoch, Ontario, where the crows squabble

like creosote in the Selkirk chimney pots of the cold morning.

And as I’ve grown foolishly into a wisdom unbefitting my age

I remember to be grateful for my ignorance as much as I am

for everything that didn’t happen but could have

like something I deserved more than it was willing

to rat me out for. I don’t make a sacrifice to myself

like Wodin on the axis mundi, or Jesus on the cross,

of the people I fall in love with like tares and wild asters

in the starfields that keep expanding my imagination

like dark energy in the subconscious coalbins

of a diamond cutter’s eye for the facets of translucency

that pass through me like spearheads of the chandeliers

that light up the waters of life with luminous tears of glass

that fall like polished lenses of rain into the housewells

of the Palace of Versailles, or even, more profoundly,

the black reflection of the Taj Mahal in a momento mori

of mystically erotic moonlight, everything opening

and closing like waterlilies and uncultivated orchids,

each according to their own unique waterclocks

with a sense of timing absolutely crucial

to the relativity of their contents revealed

like a unified field theory love longing for the superlative

discovered lightyears ago when everyone

was looking the other way like gods at a thief stealing their fire

right from under their eyes like the industrial secret

of a burning dove on a midnight shift of factory stars

creating the heavier elements of life like your starmud

in a flood of light that made everything more obviously clear

than the false dawn in the apple core of your nuclear reactor.

Wash your eyes clean of your self in tears, stop mourning

your mirages because they disappear like mirrors into the dark

to show you what a real constellation looks like

when Gabriel-Jabreel turns on the lights in the seventh heaven

as if the picture-music’s never over, and death

isn’t a curfew imposed on when you leave or not

with someone you love as if you’d never met before

but in truth, when the iris in her eyes unlocks

the security alarms on your heart, you forgot, didn’t you,

she was the blessing you swore on your holy life never to?

How many plane loads of pilgrims ago was that?

How many Arab villages of gore can be crammed

into the psyche of a video game in an abattoir

as killing takes on the lifestyle of G.I. Joe gone

mercenary in the Hundred Years War for oil

as the fourth estate of the Vatican and France

foam at the mouth like rabid dogs to foment

a holy war to clear the garbage out of Europe

by murdering their way into being made men,

capos in the Mafia of paradise, first, by slaughtering

the Albigensians, then greasing Jerusalem in human fat

and the blood of a gang-raped rose that hemorrhaged

like a virgin with immaculate conceptions of love?

Villains, villains, villains, villains everywhere, black

and white, fundamental, lock, load, fire,

no trembling, no doubt, no hesitation, dead eye

on the target, boom, and your Freudian phallus,

ejaculates like an apocalyptic moment of sexual devotion

to the stone age of a gun that’s still just a rock or a bone

in the hands of a chimpanzee going ballistic

though it’s the weapons that have evolved, not

the apes that use them like a flying buttress or a crutch

to keep their end of things up like a penis on a gargoyle

on a Gothic cathedral of sado-masochistic ideals.

Great Pan is dead. God is dead. The Mahdi

hasn’t shown up in over a hundred years, Moses

is too old to go up the mountain again and Jesus,

though he is supposed to for Muslims and Christians alike

isn’t coming back to this mad house for love of a second life

no way, no how, never again, after Birkenau

and the Khmer Rouge in the killing fields of Laos,

after Damascus and Baghdad, Sabra, Shatila,

after Aurora, Newtown and the wells of Deir Yasin,

Wall Street, the big, tough, dumbed-down, fanatical Republicans

spitting Obamacare out of their mouths like vicious brats

that can’t take their own medicine, and wouldn’t

save a kid’s life if it cast a shadow of compassion

on the baksheesh of the profit margins of their fascist ideologies

goose-stepping to the corporate boom-times of an oil drum

humping the shepherds of the black camel like a Sufi sign

of the end times. Hell is Judgement Day left to our own discretion.

Hell is a pharmaceutical company letting hundreds of thousands

in Africa die by denying them the medicine they need

to stay alive, just to keep the price high in Pakistan and India.

Hell is a mediocrity perniciously opposed to any standard

of human excellence that might show it up by contrast

for what it is to the mob it’s trying to involve

in a conspiracy of shadows against its own enlightenment.

Hell makes it a crime to break loaves and fishes on a hillside

like food stamps for the victims of the biblical famines

of the New York Stock Exchange and the thick batter of fat

the rich insulate their white collar hearts in to perpetrate

their gluttony like a board room crime against humanity.

Money mints the human like counterfeiters in the spring.

Cash flows like green foliage but no birds sing.

Slumlords alienate the humanism of their daughters.

Sons dread the prospect of becoming their fathers.

You get the picture, the litany of horrors. Hell

looks like any other day on earth, the politicians

trivializing the desecration of millions as a matter

of policy to humiliate and deprive the people

trying to hate them out of office as a rejection

of their ravenous, clumsy, sexually inept egos.

Big vacuum. Void. Bardo state. Gap between

cosmic neurons. First we string our spinal cords

like spider silk between opposites, then we lie down

like suspension bridges, or the sky goddess Nut

for others to cross to the other side

of the firewalking thresholds we are, because

things have a way of burning behind us don’t they?

Bored with the dialectical history of themselves,

conceptual shadow lives of flesh and blood,

they turn the light around, invariably, and it’s

as dark as midnight at noon, a diamond in a heart of coal,

when the dusk plays false with its beginning

and the dawn gets involved in a whole, new love affair

as if the first and the last were quantumly entangled

in other’s wavelengths like the Pleiades among the willows

stripped bare of their sorrows like black queens

in a beehive of light making honey out of the darkness

in the starfields of the magnificent wildflowers

spreading like fireweed through our baleful herb gardens

as slowly the future devolves into its arcane tomorrows.

PATRICK WHITE