Introduction to Elmallah 2

Here's the introduction that opens Bouk 2 of The Song ov Elmallahz Kumming. I call it a "belated" introduction because it stands at the beginning of Bouk 2 rather than Bouk 1.

A Belated Introduction:

This poem originated in a series of 9 poems I wrote in 1976 to a woman who was to become my wife. At that time I assumed, unrealistically, that the underlying mythic and psychologic levels in those poems would be known and understood by the reader. I was unrealistic not only because those 9 short poems implied and made reference to far more than what was stated, but because the mythic and spiritual levels I was referring to were hardly even thought about by most 20th century poetry readers.

Coming to realize this, I have expanded that short series into this narrative in six books. It attempts to lay out some of the mythic foundations of our consciousness. Many of the images briefly glossed in this book will be transposed and transisted into other scenes in other parts of the poem. At the same time, images of what is yet to come will echo in these opening scenes. In the Prophetic Conscience, past, present, and future are intertwined.

Concerning Bouk 2: for Ertha it is set in a prehistoric moment, a timeless period from which she is emerging, as she experiences a glorious expansion of her consciousness. Elmallah, diffracted into that history, and giving its evolution direction, tries to reach to her and still hold on to the Divine Moment. Tho confined in her time, his mind is not so confined. Living beyond the photon boundary that shapes space in a closed sphere, dwelling in the axis of infinite time where all things exist in infinite multiplicity and all paths are parallel and non coherent, from that awareness he communicates with Ertha. Thought flows between them, visible to Elmallah, palpable to all his senses. His infinite bodies intersect her infinite bodies. He touches her. His infinitely repeating hand reaches between her infinitely mirrored legs, there where his eyes were originally drawn, to that dark moist center in her being. His arid Conscience is interleaved in a hyper-globe of pleasure, and then desire for pleasure, and then dependence on pleasure, and then despondence over his dependence.

Elmallah is astonished by their sexual crescendo. He feels it like a vast surf washing up on the sand. It is Ertha's Conscience washed by his Knowledge, followed by her perpetual forgetting. It is his energy penetrating her levels and withdrawing. It rushes - surf - he tells her of the Lor; withdraws - surf - she hears and recreates it in her Conscience. It rushes - surf - he sees how she has distorted his Knowledge; withdraws - surf - into his despair; rushes - surf - he touches her differently and new awarenesses emerge; ebb and flow while making love. The scene ends. For a moment Ertha glimpses a vision of the Lor - surf - is thunderstruck - surf - sees now the pantheon of Babylon standing above - surf - forgets that too - surf - remembers only that she has seen something awesome that she can't hold, can't comprehend.

Ertha's history with Elmallah is not a continuous series of events, but layered states, stratified in Their Conscience.