————Blessed George Beesley, martyred in Fleet Street, London, 1591, beatified 1987

 

Hyperspectral
scissions of lightfall
diffracted by king tide’s

saltspray & temporal

turbulence
on the creekmouth at Squalicum Harbor, its poured

scint & scint & scint

like some encoded neo-scripture, urgent
hermeneutic

like GGATCC
CCTAGG
guanine guanine adenine
thymine cytosine cytosine
reverse

inverted duplicate am I tempting you yet
Beatus Georgius
Far Father,

to reenter Time you metamorphosed
out of
four centuries ago

out of incarnation when you
shed your vitals

on a scaffold in Fleet Street
bowelled and hung

Come back
into this afterlude
as into a sea you somehow remember
the scent of the geomagnetic
warp of the rift valleys

It’s estuarial here, panmixia
of quick & dead

Aphotic
zone
that’s where you like
to pilgrimage to self-conceal
under the sargassum
where sunlight cannot get
or deep in the cryptic
coding of Y-DNA’s
eight palindromic arms
in every cell of
us

eye
eve
noon
refer
reviver
solos
Esse non
deified

gone born born gone
fecund moribund
breed decease decease breed
seeded Are we headed
opposite directions through the palindrome
prodigy & progeny
should there be
such a word as ante-
geny

Natal
philopatry
love of the Father’s land let me be
for you a different
definition of source
Come toward me Father
martyr confessor as if driven
toward a fount not a mouth
toward me a less
snarled & obfuscatory Sargasso

 

 

---

Bruce Beasley is the author of nine collections of poems, most recently Prayershreds (Orison) and Theophobia (BOA). He has won four Pushcart Prizes and an NEA fellowship, and his poems have recently appeared in New American Writing, Lana Turner, Agni, and elsewhere.

 

 

 

Photo by Sangharsh Lohakare on Unsplash