Thompson's work has recently been featured in the new on line international literary magazine Wild River Review. A long poem on Western Civilization, (Canticum, Turicum) begins with folktales and traces of Charlemagne in Zurich and ends with the completion of Western Civilization as expressed in Finnegans Wake and the traces of James Joyce in Zurich. The first section, "Images of History," was published in London in the Spring 2000 issue of The Temenos Academy Review, (http://www.temenosacademy.org/temenos_journal.html) and the middle section, "The Latin Hinge," was published in the Winter 2005 issue of The Bucks County Writer. The complete text of Canticum, Turicum was published in The Wild River Reviewhttp://www.wildriverreview.com in 2006 and this publication included a Profile and Interview. A Diary of Sorts and Streets (poetry) was published by Onteros Press of Santa Fe in 2007. In 2008, two other long poems, Still Travels and Hyperborean Passageswere also published in the Wild River Review. These works will appear in book form with Wild River Books (Princeton, NJ) in November of 2009.
From A DIARY OF SORTS AND STREETS, Onteros Press: Santa Fe, NM, 2007 (P. O. Box 5720, Santa Fe, NM 87502)
The Trinity
I. God the Father
Before the Big Bang, After the Big Crunch, All that brutal light Collapsing, black holed, Recycled to dark Burst multiverses— Oh God! I can’t think Except in pictures, But I know that God Is ridiculous As God the Father— Old judgmental Dad Taking back the keys To the family car. How can we make sense? God’s the only word We have when the mind Locks in protocols, Iterating code, And nothing extrudes Around time born things.
II.The Pieta
Soft Jesus the sufferer Our cruciform conjurer Palming death in public Old Grandmama God’s Sweet butter folded Into sweat’s sourdough Clay baked in time Becoming broken bread For twisting hands of men Then dropped again Under violated eyes Collapsed startled womb.
III. The Holy Ghost
It’s 2000 now, Past time for a change, Osiris had his, And certainly Christ; Both could make dying The whole point of life. Both had goddesses Supporting their parts. It’s the Old Story— Male time, female space— But what comes round now In the ring of stars Is not religion. It’s immediate— Intimate lover More than stern parent— Psyche in the dark, Naked skin all alert To nothing she’s known— An odor of dark And a taste of light, Pulsing together Unconceptual.
William Irwin Thompson
Sunset at Point Lobos
(1964)
These cypresses are not
trees of any autumn's season;
they hold
the time
no humans keep.
This is the end of land;
this twisted cypress
points where it turns to sand.
After all the ages of speech,
the air
must taste of our confusion.
Even this present breath
has been taken
from the exhausted air of trees.
Back East
we still can speak
with mechanical confidence,
but here the sea
holds out
salt to our blind tongues.
That's why
the seals on that island bark.
On soiled rocks
where seabirds hover
they yell
as if forgotten by the ark.
Out there
is Asia
now mechanically inclined
to deny the next
tectonic catastrophe of Earth.
Small wonder
the seals bark,
for who could speak
with miniatures of history
ending in their wide, God-damaged eyes.
from Worlds Interpenetrating and Apart, Collected Poems 1959-1996.
