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    The Daring of Paradise
    The Daring of Paradise
    The Daring of Paradise
    Ebook107 pages58 minutes

    The Daring of Paradise

    By Brian Day

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    About this ebook

    The Daring of Paradise reconfigures stories and images from both multiple religions and from fairy tales, cracking them open to release new light. Poems probe the intense devotion in the letters of Paul and the sensuality shimmering within the traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. They cast lines across religious divides, gather elements of incarnate spirituality, and consider how, in our present moment, religion might speak to the body of the Earth. Both contemplative and provocative, The Daring of Paradise reveals a world shot through with desire and expands the ambit of devotional poetry, listening to "that polished emptiness pressing upon speech" and the "illicit locutions sung and fluted / through the back alleys of heaven."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGuernica
    Release dateOct 1, 2013
    ISBN9781550717129
    The Daring of Paradise
    Author

    Brian Day

    Brian Day is the author of Azure and Love Is Not Native to My Blood. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

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      Book preview

      The Daring of Paradise - Brian Day

      THE DARING OF PARADISE

      BRIAN DAY

      GUERNICA

      TORONTO – BUFFALO – LANCASTER (U.K.) 2013

      Contents

      THE DARING OF PARADISE

      Contents

      Eyes Turn Blue

      Conversion

      Paul, Apostate

      A New Husband

      I Know a Man

      Megha

      Veil of Flesh

      Prince of the Universe

      Blue Memory

      Luke

      You Had Just Stepped Out

      Religious Puberty

      Jacob, Wrestling

      Law of the Flesh

      Tonguing the Mouths

      Pursuing our Pleasure in the Body of Christ

      Frog

      The Little Mermaid

      The Bears’ House

      The Eldest Dancing Princess

      The Conception of Gautama

      Annunciation, Swimming

      A Wish to be Mary

      And Then When We Enter

      Erl-King

      Krishna in the Desert

      Lament

      Saul at Ramah

      Death’s Invitation

      Captives

      Two Boys on a Riverbank

      Muhammad and the Moon

      Hunters

      Jesus and Buddha Commiserate

      Mating Our Faiths

      Radha and the Beloved Disciple

      Imageless Image

      The Fisherman’s Wife

      Sea of Ink

      Continuing the Story

      Below Me in Blue

      Guru Nanak and Jesus

      Krishna and Jesus in Algonquin Park

      Place

      That the Stars

      Kayaking the Vézère

      Driven to the Wilderness

      Raven and Jesus

      All in Alli

      Magnificat

      Anointing

      Continuing the Party

      Mass

      Notes

      Acknowledgements

      Eyes Turn Blue

      With his eager articulate finger, God touches

      the first pendant drop of semen and fondles

      it calmly in the rainclouds of his mind, turning it

      tenderly as he gives face and skin to the formless,

      creating the world from the sap of his longing.

      The heavenly lover of smoothness and liquids

      dangles jewels of water on the bodies of boys,

      on their sleek enticing skin of pearl,

      and our eyes turn blue with the terror of his beauty.

      God lures us with globes of a succulent future,

      promising his little ones what he can’t grant us

      yet, as he toys with the pleasures of grapes

      and boys. He invites us to a riverbank

      lush with oyster, pearl, and wine,

      where our mouths are immaculate organs of knowledge.

      We recline on soft couches and are served

      luscious fruits, our vision tickled by exquisite boys

      rich with sculpture’s dark lustre and grin,

      boys as comely as virgin pearls.

      And our eyes turn blue with the daring of paradise.

      Conversion

      The universe holds a secret. You could

      call it God, but that may mislead you. You could try

      Beloved, Adored, or simply Friend. You might

      use Krishna, Shiva, Buddha. You might call it the light

      of the Torah, the breath of the Earth, the lamp

      of all the awakening world. You might,

      as the nearest you can reach with the words

      you know, call it Messiah, Anointed One, Christ,

      the bright cup drawn up from where there was no well.

      On the day this grateful secret finds you, your

      every desire is met by religion’s body. You’re

      unseated, unmanned, knocked flat to the ground

      by its lumens of beauty. Your life is the same –

      it’s just that gravity’s intentions have changed.

      The secret one shines in a circle of beauty

      here at the templed core of your life,

      and this beauty now owns your allegiance

      far more than any statable truth.

      Arguments, diluted, run through your hands.

      You are in your every tissue a lover, a novice

      of folly. You live in that enduring wonder

      when your fiercest desire is revealed

      in every crevice of the world. You are whirling, ecstatic,

      wounded by beauty, bereft in a harsh theological

      blindness, and aware of the blasphemy to all you had called,

      in your ignorance, God. A brilliance is dictated

      line by line here on the thirsting inside

      of your ransomed skin, and you

      are a phrase of beauty that can sing of such

      unbounded beauty. You are

      in your ancestry plainly human, but now

      you’re a severing of air where this secret breathes;

      you are this widely flung-open window

      to a beckoning, dear, and dearer world.

      Paul, Apostate

      He dwells in a secret that can barely

      pass his lips, the adoration of a man

      that no Jew could entertain. He’s the witness

      to the secret he’s heard whispered

      across the gauze of his skin.

      The love marks of Jesus

      are impressed on his body, and a

      gentile devotion is unleashed

      in his eyes. What he’s tried

      to strike down he now knows

      to his core: that an image

      of man holds the essence of God.

      It’s love that scours the ancient

      teachings from his skin, incites him

      to discard those worn patches

      of history, to dance as he torches

      the scrolls of the Torah. God

      has whispered a secret, a sublime

      dirty joke, a precious lubricious

      new passage of scripture. What Paul sees

      in the masculine statue of Jesus,

      this one image saved from Sodomic

      destruction, is the sudden, unexpected

      consummation of his life, his chance to heal

      in one image the rift in his world. And the pagan

      that was hiding in the heart of God

      is revealed at

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