Temple of Yes

First of two poems read on opening night of COSM in New York:

"Vision of Desert she-Hermit at Gora Konder Crater"

Last February, I was traveling
To the Gora Konder Crater where the desert hermits hang happily
suspended
On tall posts that touch the sky
Grinning with teeth so long and bright they shine in the dark
I saw a pioneer woman hangng there
She was barely aware of my presence
This giant long-boned cross-eyed pioneer woman
Slaked head to toe in riparian marsh mud
Hanging high above dry land as if crucified.
I saw she was alive
When she came aware of the hissing of Naga snakes
Her slow gaze quickened to alight on two fighting snakes on the desert
floor
below
She had a digging pole in her left hand
And when she cast that staff down
The two snakes coiled around it
To produce the emblem,
the cadusceus.

I knew then that she was not just what she appeared to be
I realized she was Hermes suspended in disguise
Hermes, that archetypal force that makes the temporal world appear
eternal
Then he-she opened her mouth to speak
He she said

“It’s the germinating seed of situations one has to clarify.
To act on that which has entered the physical world is already too
late.
Alpha and theta waves cascade across the entire brain.
The heart opening like a flower
Then it is possible for human and planet to come into resonance.
From moment to moment the imperishable one,
alternately waking and slumbering,
incessantly revivifies and destroys the whole of creation.

Then she pointed at me with an accusatory finger that lengthened just
enough
to brush the pock-mark on my cheek:

You always think nature comes to an end, but she is always just at the
beginning.
You always think nature knows her aims, but it goes much further still.
You always think nature has given everything, but Nature has more in
store.

*     *     *     *      *

*     *     *     *      *

11. ENCOUNTER WITH DRAGONFLY PHALANX

i am sleeping alone in the pampas grasses. blue tracers search and awaken
me.  the grasses are horizontally streamed by these low-flying pulses.  
conductivity of sapphire hid in the wind.  they catch me in their lightning
nest and open my innards.  my rapid eye is cast on the beating wings of a
dove in heat.  pineal switch echolocates the beat frequency.  the numbers
spin rings around the twinning glands.  my pulse races to match the pulse of
the bird and suddenly i am feverish and fertile, it is my whiteness, the
field is my wingspan.  i am suspended in this sweetness, a kind of high
frequency desire, eyes panicked by visual blanking.  this is recorded on the
hypothalamus and when the bird escapes i am suspended there and continue to
drink.  something so sweet at the roof of my mouth.  the gland persists in
counting.  the inner eye (difference in fractions of a cycle) is counting. 
then something still faster comes along, first light echoes the cheering
birds and then dragonflies at 24 mph, their wings beating alternately (front
ones rising as the rear ones fall.)  again, the pineal switch echolocates
the beat frequency. eye contact with the dragonfly, introduces me to its
phalanx, disappearances, patterned flight.  it cocks its head to the side. a
question.  the dragonflies and the tracers escape, parting the grasses like
spectral water.  now two sets of numbers circulate the lobes of my brain.  i
am searching for the third set.  vestigal eye flares and fades, the foveas
in the outer eye adjusted.  the monocular is good, the binocular still
better.  density of storm petral nests varies over the plateau.  the pattern
of nests against the swarm of drumlins yields the third set.  three sets of
numbers changes the cadence.  (in fractions of a cycle how the light
polarizes on the eye.) the rhythmic cadence is a slotted cage, and the cage
is a humming and buzzing diorama, switched by the phase, the pitch and the
cadence.  down to the thinnest heterotic string.  the first boy gambler
throws the dice and once again the anamorphic warping of the land into an
entirely new face.