On Beauty

 On Beauty

Since no pulchron has ever blundered 

Into our particle detectors or been smashed

Up in our accelerators, experts insist

She’s been Nietzsche’d into nothingness, like God.

But I have made her acquaintance as the host

Who shows me round the Garden.

She doesn’t say much, but when she finds

A momentary fragility

Or immutable massivity

A sudden twist of melody

Or deep resolving harmony

Consonants dancing lightly

Through a moving ground of vowels -

“Ah!” she cries. She shimmers like the water

Whose ripples flicker with light’s liquid flame.

She is teaching me to turn from the foolish sheep

And from my forty years of disappointment

And turn to where she stands on holy ground

For she is a mighty messenger of awe 

Burning but not consumed in living fire.

Ah! Let me walk with you across the water

Your golden path that leads me to the sun.