Selected poems
Marguerite Porete
'I am God, says Love, for Love is God and God is Love, and this Soul is God by the condition of Love. I am God by divine nature and this Soul is God by righteousness of Love. Thus this precious beloved of mine is taught and guided by me, without herself, for she is transformed into me, and such a perfect one, says Love, takes my nourishment.'
(The Mirror of Souls, Chapter 21: Love answers the argument of Reason for the sake of this book which says that such Souls take leaves of the Virtues)
You were burned at the stake
in the 13th century for not removing your book,
The Mirror of Simple Souls from circulation.
Member of the Beguine movement of mystics,
who practiced the imitation of Christ,
your writing exhibits a resemblance to
Meister Eckhart’s beliefs of finding the Lord
within us. Your only recorded life is that of
your trial for heresy, which was biased
and a farce, due to your book, which remains
to be ahead of its time, which you wrote
in Old French rather than in Latin,
and to whom you gave a copy to the local
Bishop in Chalons-en-Champagne, in 1308,
after which you were handed over to
the Inquisitor of France, the Dominican,
William of Paris, to whom you also refused
to speak to, or any of the other inquisitors,
during your imprisonment and trial.
During the trial a commission of twenty-one
theologians explored a series of fifteen
heretical propositions regarding the book,
but you refused to recant your ideas
and to take the oath exculpating you,
which then lead to your being found guilty,
and sentenced to be burnt at the take
in Paris on the first day of June 1310
at the Place de Greve. The Inquisitor
accused you of being a pseudo-mulier,
a fake woman, although your writing style
is compared to works of the time regarding
courtly love, such as Romance of the Rose,
which is a dreamy visionary allegory,
a love affair, an abstract symbol of female
sexuality, but you chose to depict the soul
needing to become one with God, and you
believed in 'The Annihilated Soul' that
has to give up the rational mind in order
to love God, that such a divine union
constitutes divine grace, and that we return
to God through love, and specifically, agape,
'the highest form of love,' which is 'the love
of God for man and love of man for God.'
Two hundred years later, St. John of the Cross,
would propose similar ideas in his book,
The Ascent of Mount Carmel, but he was
not persecuted for his writing and you were,
since the church authorities of your time
accused you of being immoral. A record
of the trial by Guillaume de Nangis, despite
its negative views towards her, does portray
that you faced your death with equanimity,
and, because of the calm you exhibited, tied
to the stake, as you were burned in the flames,
that the crowd was moved to tears.
Telling You What I Dreamed Last Night This Morning
for Art Beck
In calling up my childhood,
your question regarding whether I knew Polish or not
gives cause to remember my mother.
My mother died when I was eight, but she had
introduced books into my life, purchased a complete
set of World Book Encyclopedia for my sake.
I may have been the only five-year-old in 1950s Miami
to have had the privilege of pouring over the pages
of each volume, the dust motes floating in bright bands
of Floridian sunlight through the slats of venetian blinds.
We were close, and she taught me English,
since Polish was the language spoken in the house.
After her death, my father remarried a year later,
and the Polish dropped out of our daily vernacular.
So, I was bilingual growing up early on . . .
Your letter evoked a Proustian note
and not unlike Proust's madeleine,
it brought me back, to a time that is sacred for me —
the first eight years of my life and my mother's love
before she died at the age of forty-nine, before I lost all
of that when my father remarried a virago,
a cruel madwoman, an alcoholic
who would lock me out of the house at night.
You brought me back by your question
to a time that was a touchstone for me.
I even dreamed last night that I spoke with you
and was telling you what I am writing you this morning . . .
Seamless Glass
Adapted from Adam Mickievicz. 'Within their Silent Perfect Glass’
Of the inaudible seamless glass
the reflections mirror, pellucid and far —
they refract the stillness of the rocks
whose silhouettes darken among
the chiaroscuro of faces onshore.
The mirrored reflections reflect the silence
of sky, accompanying the sliding clouds
that skate across the absolute clarity
of its face, muting the surface
in their passing before they visibly deepen
the silence in their vanishing. The images
mirror their reflections. The lightning
and thunder don’t even wrinkle
the long and perfect unwavering elegance,
whose shine is a perpetual holographic
shimmer, which is reflected within myself,
and within this I am mirrored —
as veritable as glass as it is, I am as sheer
and lustrous. And in my turning away from
the images that give themselves form
I let them go, and the cloud anvils
of thunderheads ache with their preponderance,
of rain, while the sizzle of lightning
reiterates itself with each exclamation above
the severe clarity of the lake
that also reflects within the mirror of myself,
flickering it grazes the lake’s reflection,
and as it flashes it accentuates the stillness
within the inviolate length
of the inaudible seamless glass within me.
Wally Swist's books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love, The Daodejing: A New Interpretation, with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder, and Candling the Eggs.