Poetry Treasure

Been upgrading Jeff Lewis' page on the website. Adding text and...hopefully someday...images. Jeff is a great artist as well as a profound poet. Here's a poem from the book section called, "Playing the Rivers Backwards." Click on the title above to hot link to the book's page.

Baptism River

Certainly not the Jordan,
this root beer brown surge,
the anaconda pour,
this tireless roar
into the heads of poets,
the beds of dreamers,
the solitudes of saints
or the hells of madmen.

Certainly I have no squaw to convert,
her beargrease oiled head to immerse,
her loyalties to split between Mighty Manitou
and He who walks across Gitchigume
in tyrant splendor
upon the backs of our enslaved dreams.

I dunk the carburetor of a star.
May you make light knowable,
may you fill our cylinders with photon Cupids,
our dreams with vehicles
we can drive to the bottom of the big lake,
the Big See,
to our childhood museums on the bottom of Begin.

I dunk the typewriter.
May all the old ink wash away,
all the old writing written into us,
all the curses, all the tragedies.
May you now write only the truth
or lies graceful enough
to tempt the Word from its hole,
to rise to the mayfly
in creations complete
and consummated in morninglight.

I baptize thee in the name before names.
I baptize thee in the first creation.
I baptize thee in the language before language—
before all this gibberish
to father the First Nation
of the First People
who speak their own origins.

I baptize the television.
I give it over to the current,
the python of it
I have wrestled to the Pythia One channel
from the Aorta of Words.
The river takes it, an offering,
delivers it to the lake
where in slow motion
it falls gracefully over drop-offs
to land on a ledge
to broadcast a world above
made in the image of our deepest dreams.